What bees do in summer
Maximum population and maximum output, with the whole year's stores made in a few weeks of good weather.
Honey bees
The colony reaches its peak of 50,000 to 60,000 bees and turns the landscape's nectar into stores. A summer worker lives about six weeks and works herself to death: the wing wear is literal. Foraging is organised through the waggle dance, which communicates direction and distance well enough that a colony concentrates its effort on the best available source and abandons it when it stops yielding. The major honey flows — lime, clover, bramble, heather — all fall in this window, and a colony makes essentially its whole surplus during them.
Bumblebees
The colony that a queen founded alone in March is now at full size, which for most species means a few dozen to a few hundred workers rather than tens of thousands. Late summer is the reproductive phase: the colony switches from producing workers to producing new queens and males, and once it does, the old colony is finished. Bumblebees are also the bees flying in poor weather — they thermoregulate well enough to work at temperatures that keep honey bees indoors, which is why they matter disproportionately in a cold wet summer.
Solitary bees
The summer solitary species are a different set from the spring ones. Leafcutter bees are cutting neat semicircles from rose and lilac leaves to line their cells; mason bees have finished; wool carder bees are scraping hairs from lamb's ear and defending patches of it aggressively. Many are specialists on summer families — the daisy family above all — and a garden of spring-flowering plants supports none of them.
What actually helps in summer
Water, which is genuinely limiting in hot weather — a shallow dish with stones in it does more good in August than another plant would. Then late-summer forage: knapweed, scabious, marjoram, agastache, heather. And leaving hollow stems and dead wood alone, because that is where this season's cavity nesters are provisioning.
Social bees flying now
- Western honey beeApis melliferaEusocial, colony survives the winter
- Asian honey beeApis ceranaEusocial, colony survives the winter
- BumblebeesBombusEusocial, colony dies each autumn
- Stingless beesMeliponiniEusocial, colony survives the winter
- Africanized honey beeApis mellifera scutellata hybridsEusocial, colony survives the winter
- Giant honey beeApis dorsataEusocial, colony survives the winter
- Himalayan giant honey beeApis laboriosaEusocial, colony survives the winter
- Dwarf honey beeApis floreaEusocial, colony survives the winter
- Buff-tailed bumblebeeBombus terrestrisEusocial, colony dies each autumn
Solitary bees flying now
41in the catalogue, showing the first nine. Around ninety per cent of the world’s bee species are solitary, so this is the normal way to be a bee rather than the exception.
- Mason beesOsmiaExceptional orchard pollinators. Because they carry pollen dry and loose on the abdomen rather than wetted and packed into a leg basket, a far greater proportion falls off onto the next flower. Published comparisons commonly find that a few hundred female mason bees pollinate an orchard acre as effectively as a full honey bee colony of tens of thousands. They also fly in cooler, duller weather than honey bees, which matters enormously for fruit that blossoms in April.
- Leafcutter beesMegachileVery efficient, for the same physical reason as mason bees: dry abdominal pollen sheds readily. Megachile rotundata, the alfalfa leafcutter bee, is managed at industrial scale for lucerne seed production in North America because honey bees pollinate alfalfa badly — the flower's tripping mechanism strikes them on the head, and they learn to avoid it. Leafcutters are undeterred.
- Mining beesAndrenaEnormously important in spring, especially for orchard fruit, willows and early crops, at a point in the year when honey bee colonies are still small and reluctant to fly. Specialist species are often the most effective pollinators of their host plants by a wide margin, because their whole life history is built around that flower.
- Carpenter beesXylocopaGenuinely mixed. Important and effective pollinators of large open flowers and of several tropical crops including passionfruit, and capable buzz-pollinators. On deep tubular flowers they frequently rob rather than pollinate. The honest summary is that they matter, and not uniformly.
- Wool carder beeAnthidium manicatumA competent pollinator of the plants it favours, particularly legumes and mints, and carrying pollen dry on the abdomen means it transfers a good proportion of what it collects. The complication is the male: by excluding other bees from a flower patch he reduces visitation by species that may pollinate those plants better, and in its introduced range this competition is the main concern about the species.
- Yellow-faced beesHylaeusModest per individual and genuinely useful in aggregate, particularly for small-flowered plants that attract little else. Internal pollen transport reduces incidental transfer compared with a dry-scopa bee, so they are less efficient pollinators than mason bees for the same number of visits — a direct consequence of how they carry the load.
- Squash beesEucera subgenus Peponapis and XenoglossaHighly effective specialists. Cucurbita pollen is large, spiny and heavy and needs an insect that carries a lot of it; squash bees are built for exactly that plant and visit nothing else, so every grain they move goes somewhere useful. Multiple studies have found that where squash bee populations are healthy, they provide full pollination of a squash crop with no contribution from honey bees at all — which makes them one of the clearest cases in agriculture of a managed pollinator being unnecessary.
- Long-horned beesEucera and MelissodesImportant pollinators of legumes in Europe and of composites — sunflowers above all — in the Americas. Melissodes species are significant wild pollinators of commercial sunflower and cotton, and their presence measurably increases seed set alongside managed honey bees. Their role in the Ophrys orchid system is ecologically small and biologically remarkable: the orchid gets pollinated, the bee gets nothing at all, and the whole arrangement depends on the male emerging first.
- Red mason beeOsmia bicornisOutstanding, and for a specific mechanical reason. Pollen carried dry and loose on the abdomen sheds readily onto the next flower, where a honey bee's wetted corbicular pellet does not. She also flies in cooler, duller weather than honey bees, which matters enormously for fruit blossoming in April.
Cuckoo bees flying in summer
8 cleptoparasitic species in the catalogue fly now: Cuckoo bees, Cuckoo bumblebees, Sharp-tailed bees, Blood bees, Mourning bees, Nomad bees, Vestal cuckoo bumblebee, Dark bees. They build no nest and gather no pollen for their own young, laying instead in another bee’s provisioned cell — and their presence is a sign of a healthy host population rather than a problem with it.
Guides that go deeper
- What is a honey bee?A specific insect, not a category. Nearly everything people know about bees is drawn from one species out of roughly twenty thousand.
- Inside a honey bee colonyQueen, workers and drones — three castes with different bodies, different lifespans and different jobs, two of which come from identical eggs.
- How bees communicate and find their wayThe waggle dance encodes direction and distance in a figure of eight. It is one of the most sophisticated communication systems outside human language, and it is only part of how a colony makes decisions.
- Why bees store honeyHoney is a winter fuel supply for an animal that stays awake and warm through it. Almost no other bee needs one.
- Most bees are not honey beesAround 20,000 bee species exist. Roughly 90% are solitary, almost none make honey, and most of the ones in genuine trouble are not the one on the jar.
- Why bees swarm, and what to do if you see oneA swarm is a colony reproducing, not a colony attacking. It is also the calmest a large group of honey bees ever is, and the correct response is to leave it alone and make one phone call.
Questions people ask
The rest of the bee year
Months here are northern-hemisphere temperate. Southern-hemisphere readers should shift by roughly six months — but that shift is an approximation rather than a translation, because day length, rainfall pattern and the local flora do not shift with it. Records that genuinely span both hemispheres say so.
Plan for them
- Seasonal bee planner
It is this season and I want to do this — what should I plant?
- Flowering calendar
What should I plant so that something is always in flower for bees?
- Bee-friendly garden planner
What should I plant in the space I actually have?