Celebrate Bees! World Bee Day is May 20th

May 20th is World Bee Day, established by the UN in 2018 and tied to the birthday of Anton Janša, an 18th century Slovenian beekeeper who pioneered modern apiculture. And while the flood of designated awareness days can be exhausting – looking at you, Bad Poetry Day (August 18) and National Fried Chicken Day (July 6) – this is one worth paying attention to.

Bees have been pollinating, holding ecosystems together, and doing work the rest of us live off of for roughly 100 million years. World Bee Day is a reminder that they could use a little help right now.

Bee Facts

One in three bites of food you eat exists because a bee pollinated something.
Honey bees beat their wings 200 times a second.
Bees use the sun as a compass to navigate.
Bees communicate the location of food through a figure-eight “waggle dance.”
That glass of sweet tea you’re about to reach for would not exist without bees.

The History of Bees

Bees have been at this for somewhere around 100 million years. They evolved alongside flowering plants, each one shaping the other over enormous spans of time, in one of the longest-running partnerships on the planet. The flower’s color, its shape, the specific timing of when it blooms – a lot of that is, in some sense, a message written to bees. And bees developed the biology to receive it. The branched hairs that make pollen stick, the ability to detect ultraviolet patterns invisible to us, the navigation and memory and communication systems that hold a hive together – all of it tuned over time to this one relationship.

Central Texas Native Bees

Central Texas is home to approximately 800 native bee species, most of which are solitary – no hive, no honey. They do their work through the spring and summer, going largely unnoticed.

In springtime you can see them at work. Fruit trees, mountain laurel, all the things blooming in succession from February through June – those blooms are the result of a long relationship between plants and pollinators that found a rhythm over thousands of years. The bees know the schedule and the plants are counting on it.

Honeybees Are Imports

The honeybee, for all the attention it gets, is actually a European import, brought over by colonists in the 1600s. It does an enormous amount of agricultural work and deserves its reputation. But the native bees were here first, and they’re doing things the honeybee can’t. Texas native bees pollinate plants that co-evolved specifically with them, filling niches in ecosystems that simply wouldn’t exist otherwise.

Bees Are In Trouble

The problem – and it’s a significant one – is that the schedule bees depend on is getting harder to keep.

Habitat loss hurts. Native meadows are being replaced by concrete and manicured lawns. Pesticides are doing real damage too, particularly a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids, which researchers have strongly linked to colony collapse. If you see active ingredients like imidacloprid, clothianidin, or thiamethoxam on a product label, that’s a neonicotinoid. They’re common in general – use garden pesticides and systemic treatments, and they’re worth avoiding around flowering plants.

Climate shifts are adding to the pressure – changing bloom times, longer droughts that stress plants and reduce nectar production, and winters that don’t behave like winters anymore. All of it introduces friction into a system that evolved around a certain kind of predictability.

Texas has been in some version of drought stress for much of the past decade, and the Hill Country and Central Texas ecosystems that support pollinators have taken a real beating. When you lose the plants, you lose the bees. When you lose the bees, you lose the next generation of plants. It unravels in both directions.

How Can We Help the Bees?

Helping bees doesn’t have to be dramatic. A few simple steps make a real difference:

• Plant something that blooms, ideally something native.
• Avoid pesticide use when you can, and choose bee-safe products when you can’t.
• Leave a little mess in the corner of the yard. Leaf litter and loose soil around established trees help to support solitary bee species that nest in the ground.

If enough yards do a few of these things, across enough neighborhoods, it adds up more than you’d think.

Bees Love Flowers, But Bees Need Trees.

Bees and wildflowers go together, and for good reason – but trees are more important to bee populations than most people realize. A single mature desert willow or mesquite in bloom produces nectar at a scale that ground-level flowers simply can’t match. Live oaks, Texas redbuds, Mexican plums, fruit trees of all kinds – these trees are doing real work for the bees.

Mature trees also provide structure that bees depend on. Dead wood offers nesting habitat for solitary bees. Leaf litter and soil around established trees supports ground-nesting species. A big old tree is doing a lot of ecological work that isn’t always obvious from the outside.

Keep mature trees when you can, plant them when you have the opportunity, and think about what you’re planting. Crape myrtles are beautiful, but live oaks have been feeding Central Texas insects, birds, and mammals for a very, very long time.

Bees have been working hard for 100 million years. They could use a little help to get through the next hundred.

We Can Help You Help the Bees

Do you want to help the bees? We can help you choose and plant the best trees and flowers for your yard to attract and shelter native Texas bees. Give us a call!