Not all bees are the same. That’s why we need different strategies to help different kinds of bees. They have very different lives – some are social and live in densely populated hives, others are solitary and spend their short lives alone. Some are semi-social, tolerating the company of a few other bees or sharing a few chores to lighten the load.
Worldwide there are about 20,000 different kinds of bee (9 types of honey bee, around 250 species of bumblebee, and the rest solitary bees). Some are as big as a thumb – like Wallace’s giant bee of Indonesia. Others are tiny – like the Quasihesma bee of Australia, the males of which can be less than 2mm (0.08 inch) long. Some bees sting – such as the female honey bee. Many don’t. In fact, 500 species of bees are classed as ‘stingless’. And no male bees can sting – they just don’t have the right equipment.
No male bees can sting – they just don’t have the right equipment
The way bees organise themselves varies hugely. Honey bees are at one end of the scale – living in huge 50,000-strong colonies consisting of one queen, thousands of female worker bees (who forage, make honey, clean and guard the hive), and a few hundred short-lived male drone bees whose sole job is to fertilise the queen. Honey bees in the wild live in nests they build in tree cavities or clumped under cliff edges, but for thousands of years humans have attempted to mimic the natural nest by building beehives. Designs have varied hugely – from ancient straw skep baskets, which often involved killing the bees to harvest the honey, to the latest flow hive, a honey bee house that lets you siphon off honey without disturbing the bees.
Bumblebees, on the other hand, live in much smaller groups – usually in colonies of between 50 and 500 in number. Many species of bumblebee like to make their nests underground, in dry spaces such as abandoned mouse nests. Others prefer life above ground, nesting in dead wood, holes in trees or long grass.
And then there’s the solitary bee. The least recognised species in many ways, but the most numerous, solitary bees make up over 95 per cent of all bees. Some live underground, others like hollow plant stems, reeds or holes made by other insects. Some even like to nest in old snail shells or abandoned bird boxes. Solitary bees don’t live in colonies – the female lays her eggs in the nest, leaves a little food behind, seals up the compartment and buzzes off. That’s as far as the childcare goes. The male larvae will often hatch first, ready to mate when the females finally emerge.
The fact that most bees don’t live in a hive, and instead choose to make their homes in long grass, piles of wood, banks of earth and other marginal places, explains why native populations struggle if they can’t find enough wild areas. Loss of natural habitat doesn’t just affect the availability of flowering plants, it also means they have nowhere to nest and raise new bees.
