This Intrepid Team of Bee Lovers Are Doing Everything They Can to Save Rare Native Species From Extinction

Iridescent sweat bees, hairy-faced mining bees, tiny Perdita minima the size of a gnat. Thanks to swarms of apiary enthusiasts, native species are finally getting the buzz they deserve

April/May 2025

OPENER - A gold-green sweat bee lands on a common boneset flower in Hull, Massachusetts. — A gold-green sweat bee lands on a common boneset flower in Hull, Massachusetts. The bee is a pollen generalist, visiting a wide range of plants. Lauren Owens Lambert

One summer day in 2018, Sam Droege lowered his net and scooped up a few small bees buzzing around the blossoms of a chinquapin, a shrubby member of the chestnut tree family. Droege, a wildlife biologist, can recognize loads of bees with a quick look, but these were strangers to him. It wasn’t until he studied them under a microscope that he realized what he’d found. “Holy crap,” he said to himself. “That’s an Andrena rehni”—a bee that hadn’t been sighted in nearly 100 years.

Droege heads the United States Geological Survey Bee Lab in Beltsville, Maryland, which supports native bee research, inventory and monitoring projects. He never travels without a net, preferably the one he nicknamed Philanthus after a type of wasp that hunts bees. Opinionated, funny and idiosyncratic, he often wears his long white hair in Viking braids. For years, he drove a car rigged out to look like a dragon. A bee hunter for almost three decades, he is always on the lookout for new or rare species. He was pleased when bees drilled nesting tunnels in the walls of his straw-bale house.

For most of us, the word “bee” conjures the beloved honeybee that was brought to America by early European colonists. But native bees are very different creatures. They don’t congregate in hives or make honey. Aside from bumblebees, most native bees live solitary lives and nest underground or in tree trunks, logs, plants, rocks or other structures. And while honeybees have become the mascot for popular campaigns to “save the bees,” they’re the wrong poster child, as bee enthusiasts—or “beeple,” as some call themselves—will tell you.

Cover image of the Smithsonian Magazine April/May 2025 issue

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This article is a selection from the April/May 2025 issue of Smithsonian magazine

Wildlife biologist Sam Droege surveys the landscape for bees at the Patuxent Research Refuge in Maryland. Lauren Owens Lambert

Droege begins his morning work routine. His first job with the U.S. Geological Survey involved coordinating a citizen science survey of birds. Lauren Owens Lambert

Honeybees are domesticated livestock, like cattle or chickens; though they’ve suffered diseases that have killed off colonies, they are in no way endangered. Native bees, on the other hand, have been on this continent for tens of millions of years, co-evolving with the native flora that need help to spread their pollen. That partnership birthed a dazzling diversity of creatures that come in as many sizes, shapes and colors as the flowers they pollinate.

Bumblebees, with their shaggy pelts, are perhaps the most familiar native bee. But there are brilliant blue Osmia bees, race-car-red Nomada bees and iridescent gold-green sweat bees (so called because they lick sweat). Carpenter bees can be bigger than a quarter, while some tiny Perdita bees are smaller than George Washington’s nose on that quarter’s face. Some native bees use long tongues to reach nectar in deep-cupped flowers; some have hooked hairs on their faces to accumulate pollen grains from floral tubes. Oil-collecting bees have spongy hairs on their legs to sop up the floral oils they mix with pollen to provision their young in the nest. Squash bees go out early to catch squash blossoms when they open, while sweat bees in Texas forage at night to gather pollen from evening primroses. There are bees that clip circles from leaves to build their nest and others that secrete a cellophane-like resin to keep the nest cells watertight. There are bees that drill nests into sandstone or hollow reeds or take over empty snail shells. Twenty percent of native bees are kleptoparasites, which lay their eggs in other bees’ nests, often leaving their young to feed on those other bees’ young.

All told, there are an estimated 3,600 different species of bees in the United States—more than in any other country in the world. While commercial farms rent truckloads of honeybees each spring to pollinate commercial crops, native bees are the unsung heroes maintaining our food supply. They pollinate some 75 percent of our plants, both cultivated and wild. Indeed, some plants—tomatoes, eggplants, kiwis and blueberries—can only be pollinated by native bees. These plants only release pollen when shaken; certain native bees can buzz their muscles to vibrate the pollen loose, something honeybees don’t know how to do.

An Andrena rehni bee collected in 2023. — An *Andrena rehni* bee collected in 2023. This species associated with the American chestnut hadn’t been seen in nearly a century when it turned up in 2018 on a chinquapin, a shrubby chestnut relative. Lauren Owens Lambert

The blossoms of the American chestnut tree, which used to dominate large swaths of forest in the eastern United States. A blight in the early 20th century killed billions of chestnut trees, leaving the species functionally extinct. Lauren Owens Lambert

Like pollinators in general, though, native bees are in decline. Pesticides, pathogens and diseases are partly to blame. But the biggest cause is habitat loss: the steady displacement of plants and open spaces by housing developments and highways, cities and shopping malls, farms and flowerless lawns. We humans wouldn’t starve if all native bees disappeared, but our diets would be a lot more boring and a lot less nutritious: We’d be largely reduced to nuts, grains—and, of course, honey. Yet when it comes to understanding these crucial cogs of life, says Droege, “We’re about 100 years behind where we are on plants, butterflies and birds.” That’s in part because bees are hard to study. Even experts need microscopes and taxonomic guides to identify the tiny, often subtle features that distinguish species. Basic information about most species remains unknown—their lifestyle, their plant preferences, the places they’re found, their historic distribution. Without that data, it’s hard to know which ones are in trouble or what measures are needed to protect them. Droege used to sign off his emails with the line: “How can you save the bees if you don’t even know their names? — Bee”

Only around 600 bee species have been formally assessed for their risk of extinction. As for the remaining 3,000? “We truly don’t know,” says Saff Killingsworth, a conservation biologist at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Many species haven’t been seen in decades. And until recently, Killingsworth explains, there have been few efforts to systematically survey native bee populations. At the Xerces Society, Killingsworth co-leads a State of the Bees Initiative, which involves combing through the digitized records of nearly two million bee specimens in collections around the United States and Mexico to help establish which species are at risk of extinction and where and why.

Meanwhile, a small army of beeple are working to collect and identify native bees and track the plants the bees interact with. Some are trained scientists; others are ordinary citizens with a love of bees. This is “old-timey natural history,” Leif Richardson, another conservation biologist at the Xerces Society, says. In an era of molecular biology and genomics, beeple rely on old-fashioned nets and specimen jars. It’s not sexy science. All it provides is the most basic information: what bees were on what flowers at a given location and point in time. But that knowledge is critical for parsing the status of native bees. “When you combine millions of these records, for thousands of species, you start to see coherent patterns in the data,” Richardson says.

Droege, 67, is a key figure among beeple. He’s both deeply knowledgeable and uncommonly generous in sharing his expertise and the resources of his lab. He can talk high science with PhDs and woo non-expert audiences with wisecracks about “how badass that bee looks.” Over the years, he’s inspired and trained scores of researchers working on behalf of native bees. He also maintains an email list with more than 1,000 subscribers, which is where he announced that he had found rare Andrena rehni bees. He urged readers to check chestnuts or chinquapins for the bee. To two friends who were particularly avid collectors, he wrote: “Get thee to a chestnut.” Conserving bees starts with knowing what’s there. And, as the story of Andrena rehni shows, that often depends on knowing where to look.

When Tracy Zarrillo saw Droege’s message about the Andrena rehni, she had a pretty good idea where she should search for it. Zarrillo is an entomologist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven, which started efforts to breed blight-resistant chestnut trees in 1930. An invasive fungus known as chestnut blight—which famously struck billions of American chestnut trees in the first decades of the 20th century—killed the trees’ trunks and branches but not their roots, leaving the species in a biological limbo. They were not extinct but were mostly unable to rebound or reproduce. For nearly a century researchers have been working to breed chestnut trees that can withstand the blight. One of those experimental orchards lay a scant seven miles from Zarrillo’s office. She sent an assistant over to look for Andrena rehni bees. “Lo and behold, there was a thriving population there,” she told me.

Well, “thriving” might be a stretch. Her first check in the summer of 2019 netted only three Andrena rehni off the dangly catkins of yellow chestnut flowers. In 2021, Zarrillo did a more systematic survey of the orchard and collected 39 Andrena rehni (as well as four dozen other bee species). The next year, she broadened her search and found Andrena rehni at two other research orchards in two different counties.

Tracy Zarrillo, an entomologist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven, Connecticut, holds a clipboard as collaborator Casey Johnson searches for bees at Dovehill Farm. The eastern Connecticut farm—which produces vegetables, eggs and wool—has a section of land set aside for pollinators. Lauren Owens Lambert

Some beeple have adored bugs since childhood. Not Zarrillo. She fell into entomology when she took what she imagined would be a short-term job as research assistant at the Connecticut Agriculture Experiment Station. An early project had her raising maggots on green peppers. “It really turned me off peppers for a few years,” she said. In 2009, the research station put her on a study investigating beneficial pollinators. Her boss suggested she take a course on bee identification with Droege. “I was just blown away by his excitement,” she recalled. “He became my biggest cheerleader besides my mom.” Zarrillo, who was then in her 40s, went on to earn a master’s degree in biology, focusing her thesis on wild bee communities in Connecticut.

Zarrillo has a low-key, cheerful manner and hair dyed the orange-gold of a bumblebee. She has been running the entomology lab since her boss’s retirement in 2022. The shelves of her office are stacked with white pizza-box-like containers storing bees she’s collected. Some are from a place called Robbins Swamp, a onetime cornfield that is being restored as a pollinator meadow. In 2021, the plot was filled with an array of native plants, including common milkweed, bee balm, ironweed, blue vervain and monkey flower. Already Zarrillo has observed that “some very important species,” including two declining species of bumblebees, have found the meadow. Once the right plants are there, it seems, the bees just show up.

When I visited Zarrillo at her lab last spring, she was putting the finishing touches on an overall inventory of Connecticut’s bees. (Many other states are doing similar projects.) The last full inventory was conducted in 1916 by Henry Lorenz Viereck, a famed entomologist whose career was cut short when he was struck by a car while collecting insects beside a road in Ohio. As it happens, Viereck was also the first person to describe Andrena rehni, in 1907. (He named it after James A.G. Rehn, who caught the specimen against which all others are compared in 1902.) Updating Viereck’s inventory was a monumental task. Zarrillo and colleagues combed through falling-apart 19th-century bee guides, looking for mentions of species found in Connecticut—a process complicated by frequent name changes as taxonomists lumped together or split species. They scoured some 40,000 records of bee specimens in collections, and more than 18,000 verified sightings on the community science site iNaturalist. Zarrillo did her own targeted field searches for certain uncommon bees.

A rusty patched bumblebee, one of two bumblebees on the federal list of endangered species. The exact cause of the bee’s decline is not known. Lauren Owens Lambert

A common boneset flower native to the eastern United States. Lauren Owens Lambert

All in all, she and her colleagues determined that Connecticut is—or has been—home to 385 bee species, including a dozen never before reported in the state. The inventory included 43 species that hadn’t been reported since 2000. “The biggest problem for bees in Connecticut is habitat loss,” Zarrillo said. Places that bees rely on to collect pollen and build nests are being chipped away from all sides—from development, from browsing deer, from invasive plants.

One of the missing bees is Bombus affinis, better known as the rusty patched bumblebee. Historically, it buzzed across the eastern United States, extending south into Georgia and as far west as the Dakotas, and into parts of Canada. Now there are scattered populations in half as many places. The last one found in Connecticut was a female collected at a pick-your-own-fruit farm in Guilford in June 1997. The cause of the bee’s sharp decline isn’t fully known, but experts think it’s due to an interaction between a pathogen introduced by European bumblebees and exposure to pesticides. The bee was added to the federal endangered species list in 2017. As of this writing, there are nine bees on the list, including seven from Hawaii and a Western native, Franklin’s bumblebee. Many more are on various state endangered species lists.

Zarrillo offered to show me some rusty patched bumblebees held in the Agricultural Experiment Station’s archive. The archivist brought out a box containing 23, some pinned to old labels filled out in fountain pen. Looking at each fuzzy body, curled like a comma in its cardboard sarcophagus, felt like being at the graveside of a stranger I should have known.

Not all native bees are as easy to keep track of as big, noisy bumblebees. An estimated 30 percent are picky foragers that use pollen from only one plant species or plant family. Others are finicky nesters that only settle down in sand, for example. Those Goldilocks conditions exist in such a limited number of places that the bees have only been collected a handful of times. (Indeed, about 1,000 of our native bee species are known by fewer than 20 cataloged specimens.) The more specialized the bee, the more precarious its existence, and the more likely it is to need conservation.

Finding these uncommon bees takes a certain kind of obsessive collector—a type Droege calls a beehead. He considers himself one. Beeheads, he says, are driven by a fanatical curiosity. They’re the ones out hunting every day to see what they might find or pulling over by the roadside to investigate what’s buzzing around an interesting patch of weeds. They’ll crouch by a plant or nest just to see who visits. Beeheads live for the thrill of discovery. When Droege announced the Andrena rehni find, he knew that “of course Michael would go looking for it,” he said.

Michael Veit is a retired high school biology teacher who lives in rural Pepperell, Massachusetts, and calls himself “beedude” in his email address. He’s long loved insects. “They’re just this really cool little package of life,” he explained. He was focused on damselflies and dragonflies until about 2004, when he realized there were more than twice as many bees in Massachusetts and they weren’t nearly as well studied. Veit collected the second specimen of a cuckoo bee called Nomada rodecki ever found in America. He also found the Nomada rodecki with two different species of Melitta bee: M. americana, which is a cranberry flower specialist, and M. melittoides, which is a maleberry flower specialist. His sightings helped establish that these were hosts of the cuckoo bee. “Discoveries like that really get you pumped up to go out and look harder,” he said.

Michael Veit, a hobby entomologist and retired science teacher at Lawrence Academy in northern Massachusetts, uses a microscope at his home to examine a chestnut bee he found in 2020. Lauren Owens Lambert

Veit surveys for bees at the nearby Seminatore Woods Pollinator Meadow, which he spent seven years restoring. Lauren Owens Lambert

Such beeheadery has made him one of Massachusetts’ leading bee authorities, a co-author of a 2021 checklist of the state’s 390 native bees. His tireless scouting of the state and talent for identification helped establish that five of the state’s bees are imperiled, and he got them added to the state’s list of Endangered, Threatened and Special Concern Species.

I joined Veit last May to hunt bees in some of his favorite places. One was a shaded trail along a glittering trout stream in a nature reserve near his home. “One of the reasons I’m so drawn to bee hunting is I get to visit beautiful places like this,” Veit said. He’s a trim, soft-spoken and eager imparter of information. As he walked swiftly down the trail, scanning for bees and lifting his binoculars every so often to get a better look, he kept up a running commentary on the plants at our feet. “This is a really nasty invasive plant called garlic mustard. It’s a pretty good bee plant. And this,” he said, pointing to a dainty purple flower, “is an introduced species, speedwell, in the genus Veronica. It’ll attract bees. And this is a native geranium, and it has a specialist bee that collects its pollen.”

Bee hunting is often as much about plants as about bees, and Veit had picked this spot for a particular plant he’d found there: golden alexander, which has umbrella-like clusters of tiny yellow flowers. The flower is a host for a specialist bee called Andrena ziziae. The first patch we reached was still in the shade, so there weren’t any bees. (Most bees prefer, or even need, the warmth of sunlight to be active.) Veit began adjusting my expectations. “When you find a specialist bee plant like golden alexander, there’s no guarantee you’re going to find a bee.” But he’d barely completed the sentence when he spotted one: a tiny female dusted in pollen. Farther on he pointed out several males, recognizable by the yellow on their face. “Ah, here’s another female. She’s cute.”

The bicolored striped sweat bee has a short tongue, which leads it to collect nectar from flowers with shallow tubes. Its metallic green head makes it relatively easy to spot. Yellow and black stripes distinguish the male bees of this species, while the females have white and black stripes. Lauren Owens Lambert

The goldenrod plant is a popular stop for bees of many kinds, including bicolored striped sweat bees. Lauren Owens Lambert

I could scarcely see the bees, much less the details he was clocking, but I was prepared to take his word on her cuteness.

“So I’m going to collect a few of these,” he said, and swung his net with a graceful downward and upward swoop. Then, pinching it closed to hold the captives, he moved on to net some more. Veit keeps most of the bees he captures, unless they’re boringly commonplace, like the fuzzy fat Bombus impatiens he’d released from his net earlier that day. The bee, easily found all over the East Coast, is one of the few bumblebee species that seems to be increasing its range and number.

He transferred the bees into a glass vial with a chemical at the bottom that would kill them quickly. Back at the car, he put each bee in a film canister marked with a number. He then logged the number and the date, time and plant on which the bees were found in a green field notebook. (He has a stack of these notebooks in his office.) He would use this data on the labels for specimens added to his collection.

Some critics have objected to collecting bees that may be imperiled. Veit and others swat away the objection. There’s no evidence that collecting any insect has an effect on the bugs’ population, they say. As one entomologist wrote, “While it is extremely difficult to make a dent in most insect populations with a net, the bulldozer, the cow and the plow eradicate whole butterfly colonies in no time.”

When Veit read Droege’s message about Andrena rehni, he contacted the American Chestnut Foundation for advice on where to find chestnut trees. The group directed him to a number of sites, including Mount Ella in Massachusetts, where the forest canopy had been cleared by a freak tornado in 2011, opening up space for remnant chestnuts there to bloom. East Coast forests are still full of chestnut sprouts just waiting for a break in the overstory—the tallest trees forming the top canopy—that will allow them to drink up sun and grow. Alas, at some point, the blight inevitably reasserts itself and kills the stem again.

A female squash bee, a specialist that pollinates only the flowers of squashes, pumpkins and gourds. Lauren Owens Lambert

Squash flower — A squash flower. Humans first domesticated squash plants in Mexico about 10,000 years ago. Indigenous groups brought them into what is now the United States, and as the plants spread into the Intermountain West and the Northeast, the squash bee also expanded into that new terrain. Lauren Owens Lambert

Veit surveyed the chestnut groves in the summer of 2020 and found three female Andrena rehni. “That got me pretty excited,” he recalled. Over the next three years, he and other beeheads returned to the site, as well as other places where there were chestnuts, hybrids or chinquapins, finding more of the bees.

Since Andrea rehni’s rediscovery, it has been collected in at least five more states. The bee is clearly still around, but in low enough numbers that the Connecticut inventory lists it as a species of “special conservation concern.” The finds helped confirm Droege’s initial hunch that Andrena rehni is a specialist, reliant on chestnuts and their relatives. But if that’s true, then what sustained this “chestnut bee” when the chestnuts disappeared? Was it other members of the chestnut family or hybrids bred to help save chestnut trees from oblivion? And how did these tiny insects, which can’t travel that far, find their way to places like Mount Ella just in time to catch the trees in bloom? Add these to the big book of bee mysteries. Killingsworth told me, “In the work that I do, there’s always about five questions for every answer that I have.”

Droege’s Bee Lab has long been based in the Patuxent Research Refuge, a site created in 1936 to support federal wildlife research. In 2019, he moved to a more remote and roomier part of the refuge where endangered whooping cranes were once bred and raised. It held a ramshackle building and 30 acres of land. The main building is filled with bee-related art and quirky artifacts. An old library card catalog holds office supplies. A lane from an old bowling alley serves as a long central table. Old books with marbled pages hold up shelves. The floor is orange with yellow paint slashes, the ceiling sky blue, and the walls hand-plastered with ocher clay. The bathroom is covered in mosaics, some made by his partner, who’s an artist. “Everything here is scavenged,” Droege says with pride. Aside from his salary and, more recently, the salary of a lab manager, the lab runs on a shoestring budget of just $12,000, recently slashed from $20,000.

The lab’s most expensive piece of equipment is the camera Droege uses to photograph bees. He uses a method of producing stunningly detailed portraits that reveal the beauty that otherwise can only be seen through a microscope. Droege posts the pictures online to aid people trying to identify species. With more than 66 million views, it’s clear his site is drawing those beyond the close world of beeple. One set of images captured more than 250,000 views after it was shared to a Reddit community called “WoahDude.”

Macropis cuckoo bee, loosestrife flowers, Macropis oil bee — The Macropis cuckoo bee (left) is a kleptoparasite, which means it steals resources meant for another kind of bee—in this case, a Macropis oil bee (right). The oil bee collects pollen from loosestrife flowers (center) and then brings a pollen ball back to its nest. The cuckoo bee, which doesn’t have any physical apparatus for collecting pollen, lays its eggs in the oil bee’s nest. Then the cuckoo bee’s larvae consume the pollen. Lauren Owens Lambert (3)

Droege is one of fewer than a dozen people in the country with the taxonomic chops to identify bees accurately. So many beeple want to tap that ability that he has amassed a collection of 200,000 specimens awaiting identification—stacks and stacks of white pizza boxes. Mondays are “sacred bee days” where he works at home just identifying. And every Wednesday, he and a colleague from the lab hold a Zoom class teaching other beeple how to do it.

At the same time, Droege is modeling what ordinary people can do to help bees thrive. He has filled the land around the lab with unruly plots of plants. He walks through, stooping every so often to pull weeds. “We need to grow a lot of plants, of many different kinds, all kinds of obscure ones,” he says. “It’s just so hard to catch, identify, process and do surveys of bees; really, it’s better to concentrate on what plants the bees are using.” Take the Physalis, or groundcherry, growing by the lab’s front door. There are four bee species that gather the plant’s pollen, and at least one parasitic bee that preys on the nest of one of those specialists. “So, when it’s in bloom it’s just a circus. But it’s not on anyone’s list of pollinator plants.”

That same logic drives a citizen science project Droege helped create in 2021, Ask a Bumblebee. Jenan El-Hifnawi, a University of Maryland graduate student whom Droege chose to run the project, told me, “We’re trying to ask the bumblebees, what flowers are their favorites?” Although there’s ample research showing which flowers bumblebees visit, there’s almost nothing indicating which ones they like best. To find out, they’re having volunteers walk around for 30 minutes, recording every type of flower they see and tallying the bees they see visiting those plants. “If the bees have 50 plants to choose from, and they’re only on five, that tells us a lot,” El-Hifnawi said. Some answers have been surprising. For instance, it appears bumblebees don’t much care for some of the flowers contained in popular seed mixes, such as black-eyed Susans. The goal is to give people putting in plants anywhere—from public parks to highway medians to their own backyards—a list of the plants that will draw bumblebees.

That’s the simplest part of the bee story: Maintaining diverse and pesticide-free habitats will go a long way toward protecting native species. After all, these creatures are at home here. If enough people fill their own yards with the plants they want and need, the bees will show up, keeping our world in bloom for a long time to come.

This Intrepid Team of Bee Lovers Are Doing Everything They Can to Save Rare Native Species From Extinction

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