I enjoy a good wander in the forest. This year, I’ve been roaming the Munson Sandhills bike trails more than in other years. When life is busy, why not take to a trail and clear your mind while getting some exercise? Sounds nice, doesn’t it?
What I enjoy more than a restorative walk, if I’m being honest, is a nature mission. I’m not really built to clear my mind by walking in nature; my brain is always trying to find a story in the flora and fauna I see. So, a few months into my Munson wanders, I was ecstatic when a mission presented itself.
It started with an entirely different mission two years ago. The City Nature Challenge is an annual event where different cities compete to see who can record the most iNaturalist observations. The event is in late April, when there are plenty of flowers in bloom and insects on and around them, not to mention larger critters. Among the dozens of observations I made in a Munson Sandhills afternoon was this one bee I found in a prickly pear flower with several other insects. I guessed that it was common longhorn bee, but no one on iNaturalist confirmed or corrected it. It quickly slipped from my memory.
Almost two years later, it slipped back in. Bee researchers identified it as a longhorn bee, potentially a rare specialist of prickly pear flowers. The bee doesn’t even have a common name; it goes merely by Melissodes mitchelli. Let’s call it the prickly pear longhorn, maybe?
The researchers didn’t definitively ID the bee, instead narrowing it down to a subgenus and expressing that it would be cool if it turned out to be M. mitchelli. This was in March, and prickly pear plants flower in April and May.
Mission accepted.
Finding prickly pears (genus Opuntia)
Step one: find the plants.
iNaturalist records location information, so I can relocate the prickly pear this bee visited. It’s in a section of the Munson Sandhills region of the Apalachicola National Forest with the highest concentration of prickly pear observations in Leon County. Most observations doesn’t necessarily mean most prickly pears, but it’s a good start.
The hidden value of such a mission is that you end up seeing so many other plants and animals in the habitat. You can scroll down to see those. For now, let’s focus on prickly pears and bees.
Pollinators of a North Florida Backyard
WFSU Ecology Producer Rob Diaz de Villegas has extensively photographed insects in his yard and other north Florida locales. The following pages include the most common species you might see in your yard, which is a surprisingly diverse lot, as well as a few rare or specialized forest species.
Munson Sandhills: April 11, 2025
Other bees of the Munson Sandhills
During one of my “aimless” walks here a few weeks ago, blueberry shrubs were in full bloom, and blueberry digger bees were everywhere. That season has passed, mostly. I see a single blueberry digger sniffing the remaining blooms. This bee is another specialist, though not as rare as Melissodes mitchelli. Blueberry shrubs are starting to make fruit, and soon all that will be left of this bee are its larvae, safely tucked away in underground nests.
I head off trail to the left, zigzagging across it in either direction and walking as far as I can into open areas. Like most understory plants in a longleaf ecosystem, prickly pears grow where the ground is uncrowded by shrubs. This part of the forest was burned last January; I know this because I unknowingly showed up to photograph a specific plant, and the landscape was freshly charred. A little more than a year later, there is still plenty of open ground.
Open ground gives herbaceous wildflowers space to grow, and ground-nesting bees a place to dig.
I follow this southern plains bumblebee around for a while. The IUCN (International Union of Conservation Science) classifies this bee as Globally Endangered. Like many animals with declining populations, it’s a victim of habitat loss. They’re a common sight in these sandhills, though, and I even have them in my Tallahassee yard from time to time. The Florida panhandle has hundreds of thousands of acres of conserved habitat, about 600,000 of them in the Apalachicola National Forest. This area is a haven for imperiled species.
Mapping prickly pears
Are you familiar with prickly pears? They are small cactuses of the genus Opuntia. In Florida, they are common in sandy areas along the coast, and in higher elevations such as the Lake Wales Ridge, or sandhills along the Cody Escarpment. Millions of years ago, Florida’s higher elevation sandy areas were beach dunes, and so, any place that is or was a beach dune is a likely place to find Opuntia.
I find over a dozen prickly pears in the vicinity of that first sighting.
About half of the plants I find have flower buds on them:
It looks like we’re a couple of weeks away, at least.
Some fun facts about prickly pears. The pads, which are edible, are modified stems. The spines are modified leaves. The flowers will produce edible fruit, so I’ll have to come back later in the year and photograph those.
Munson Sandhills: April 23, 2025
More of the Opuntia have flower buds, and many of them look like they’ll soon bloom.
Here we can see glochids, the hair-like bristles at the base of the spines. This is a plant with a tough skin and various defenses, and yet, I find insects eating it:
Here’s another cactus specialist, and it’s attacking the flower as it forms. The plant above looks distressed.
Insects are eating the source of Melissodes mitchelli‘s nectar and pollen. Other insects might come after the bee itself:
Robber flies often go after bees. Many robber fly species are in fact bee mimics. Others are barely visible as they hide on the forest floor:
Munson Sandhills: May 9, 2025
The first several prickly pears I see look unhealthy to me.
I see more cactus consumers today:
When I start to find Opuntia with flowers, this is what I see:
Flower scarabs are known to be indelicate pollinators. I don’t know if this beetle chewed through the flower, but it is getting its fill of pollen.
I consulted with Clint Gibson about Melissodes mitchelli. Clint has been a field researcher with the Florida Museum of Natural History, working on rare pollinator research. His work has focused on central Florida scrub – a high, sandy habitat.
I have always wondered about the ecological advantage of specializing, so I asked Clint about it. His answer was that it’s a disadvantage, actually. Specialist animals, he says, had been outcompeted by generalist animals. I’m writing in August, when numerous generalist bee species are at peak numbers in my yard (horsemint and Brickellia season is always a frenzy). If a bee struggles to complete in this busy atmosphere, it might have better luck focusing on flowers that bloom for a short period, either before or after peak pollinator season.
A specialist bee is tied to its plant; their larvae will only consume pollen from host plants. Prickly pears are common plants, but open intact sandhill and scrub habitats that are frequently burned, those habitat types have become fragmented.
After today’s start, I wonder how many healthy prickly pears there are for these bees.
Finally…
None of the flowers are fully open, but:
Bees fly in and out of a couple of the unopened flowers. I try to photograph them, but they’re not still for long enough to get a clear shot. Finally, one decides it wants to pose for me, and flies up onto the bare branch of a shrub.
Every once in a while, bees clean pollen off of their probosces. I submit this photo to iNaturalist, and this time, there is a consensus that this is indeed Melissodes mitchelli.
I continue walking off-path, in the direction of prickly pears I had seen near this one.
Usually, only one or two flowers open on a prickly pear per day. This one has a few visiting bees.
When I’m back at the station reviewing my photos, I see that one bee I thought was a longhorn was something different:
The way this bee stores pollen on the underside of its abdomen is indicative of a bee in the Megachilidae family. The closest visual match to this bee is the genus Lithurgopsis, which contains the southeastern wood borer, a specialist in cactus flowers. I show my photos to Clint Gibson. None of my photos show the second apical band in its entirety, so he won’t say definitively that this is the bee.
If this bee is the southeastern woodborer, then we have two specialists visiting these flowers.
Munson Sandhills: May 14, 2025
Today is more about shooting video than photos. I’m finding that some Opuntia have days with no open flowers. The spots where I photographed bees last week have no flowers, but I find flowers in new places. Active flowers.
The bee we see above has no pollen sacs and much longer antennae than the other bees of his species. This is why they call them longhorns.
I’ve photographed a lot of bees and butterflies, and one thing is consistent. Males are always trying to mate with females on flowers, and females almost always try to shake them off to continue eating. It’s a wonder we ever get new bees and butterflies.
Not much is known about Melissodes mitchelli. Clint Gibson thinks this bee is likely more widespread than what we see on iNaturalist, and that people might misidentify it. Several longhorn species look similar, and if certain features aren’t clear in a photo, it might end up being identified as a common longhorn.
Clint also believes that if more people seek this out, more people will find it. He found a population along the Chassahowitzka River in May, and thinks the Lake Wales Ridge might be the hotspot for the bee. There are single observations for Melissodes mitchelli in the Villages, in Gainesville, and in Central Georgia. And then there’s this population in south Leon County. All but one of the bee’s iNaturalist observations are from 2025.
I have some ideas where I might look for the bee in 2026. As I write this, though, Melissodes mitchelli has long since been confined to below-ground nests.
What else did I see in the Munson Sandhills?
This is what happens when you geek out on a single little critter, like a bee or a salamander. Primarily, you learn a lot about the plants and animals it associates with. For the first time in my life, I paid close attention to prickly pears. I saw how many insects eat the plant and its flowers (we see more in the video), and that it is pollinated by at least two specialist bees.
I visited the same location multiple times over the span of about a month. There were too many other plants and animals not directly related to my target species, too many to ignore. Here’s a little slice of sandhill life.
April 11, 2025
There was a large patch of sundial lupine right along the trail. This is, of course, the larval host for the rare frosted elfin butterfly. I stayed a while by this patch, but didn’t see any here. Eventually, I had to attend to my purpose here today. Years ago, I did tag along while citizen scientists counted elfins and searched for caterpillars.
April 23, 2025
I hadn’t really seen monarchs yet, but around this time, we did have our first ever queen caterpillars back home in the yard. The same City Nature Challenge I found Melissodes mitchelli, I took photos of a queen laying eggs on sandhills milkweed in April.
These caterpillars won’t be the only insects eating milkweed:
I saw another larval host plant:
The same aimless walk when I saw so many blueberry diggers, I also saw several zebra swallowtail butterflies. This is the plant their caterpillars eat.
A couple of years ago, I drove around Tall Timbers with Jim Cox, who was months away from retiring as the director of the Stoddard Bird Lab. It was at the same time of year as this excursion, which is when nuthatches nest. The meal in its beak could very well be for nestlings.
May 9, 2025
Sandhills milkweed had started to go to seed by now, and I never saw caterpillars. Had I checked areas away from the prickly pears, I would likely also have found butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa).
May 14, 2025
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