NATIVE BEES:
While honey bees often receive most of the media attention, native bees are in many ways the unspoken heroes.
While honey bees are very social creatures, the less commonly discussed solitary bees or semi-social bumblebees are responsible for a great amount of the pollination that takes place in the U.S. today.
Many of these wild bees are either endangered or in significant decline due to a number of factors that are usually unrelated to honeybee decline.
For this reason, if honey bees disappeared, we would likely still have these around to pollinate.
However, we still need to be cognizant of how endangered many of these wild species are.
A recent study has found that wild bees contribute $3,251 per hectare to the production of crops through their pollination.
this gives them essentially the same economic value as commercial honeybees, but with much smaller population sizes
this means that they are exponentially more productive than honey bees at pollination
Yet, they typically depend on specific plants. So while they may be very productive, they can't always assist in the pollination of crops.
Many are quite worried for the future of many solitary and wild bee species, and for this reason they are looking for ways to help.
planting flowers and other plants to attract wild bees can be beneficial.
recently, many have started to create bee hotels, or a wooden structure that provides refuge for these independent bees
They consist of structures which are a collection of small hollowed wooden poles as featured above.
while creators need to be cognizant of the care it takes to construct these, with good maintenance they can be very beneficial.