It warmed up for a second last week, and I started wondering, “When will I see bees?” As I often do when I have a question about seasonality, I opened iNaturalist. I looked specifically for one of the earliest flying species I know, and found that I had observed a sandhills cellophane bee on February 11, 2024. Every north Florida winter is different, but we see bees when other states are shoveling snow. Many of our first bees are specialists, and sometimes they are rare.
I first met this bee while producing a segment about citizen science data. I approached the Florida Natural Areas Inventory; they use iNaturalist observations to track rare and endangered species. That’s pretty straightforward. We see plants and animals of interest, and we create data points when we observe them in the app. But, Dave Almquist had a different idea.
A specialist pollinator has a relationship with a specific plant. That plant may be part of a community with other specific plants, and those plants have relationships with other insects. If you find those plants and insects together, maybe you find your specialist. He made a map, and I found the sandhills cellophane bee at the first spot I checked. Within two minutes. At a location only ten minutes away from WFSU.
I went back last week and took a few photos. In doing so, I had a better sense of this animal and its environment.
Open sand near cypress wetlands
Let’s revisit the environment. This bee only flies for a few weeks out of the year, when climbing fetterbush is in bloom. The plant is in the heath family (Ericaceae), along with blueberries, which also bloom at this time. Fetterbush grows at the edge of cypress wetlands, often climbing under the bark of cypress trees and sprouting out high above the water.
You can see the watermarks on the buttresses of those trees. We’re in a drought, and the water is much lower than the last time I was here.
Climbing fetterbush is a shrubby vine. It has flowers that closely resemble those of its cousins, the blueberries.
Those flowers might look a little torn up, and we’ll get into why in just a little bit.
Now, we turn our backs on the wetland, and it looks like an entirely different place.
A specialist bee needs a specific plant, but this bee also needs a specific place to nest. Dave was excited about this spot because you can see the open sand in a satellite image. Soft open sand, near a cypress wetland – the sandhills cellophane bee is a specialist twice over. This is typical of the genus Colletes; they tend to specialize in flower species as well as soil types.
Emerge from nest, make new nest
These bees spend most of the year beneath the ground as larvae. When bees emerge from a nest, they start to find mates and make new nests. This nesting site is near a road, and as I walk in, I find nests right away. The nest is below-ground. The mound we see above-ground is called the tumulus. Many insects make mounds in soil, but bee nest openings are about the size of a bee.
Like a lot of solitary ground-nesting bees, sandhills cellophane bees nest close together.
I find a lot of nests in the largest sandy clearing. They’re also scattered in smaller open patches among the sedges. On my second visit of the week, I found a second open area with multiple nests.
This area has everything a sandhills cellophane bee needs, but it’s right next to the road.
I sat for a while and watched a bee start to dig a nest.
The Southeastern Blueberry Digger Bee
I walk back over to the wetland to photograph bees. In 2024, I had trouble photographing many of the bees visiting fetterbush and blueberry flowers because they were chased off by carpenter bees. Today, I had hoped to find cellophane bees on their host plant, but instead find a different specialist.
There were several blueberry digger bees visiting the flowers today. I noticed they all had white faces, which I hadn’t seen on this species before. It turns out that, like carpenter bees, white faces mark the males. The males emerge first, from the top cells in their buried nests. They won’t stray far from the female-filled nests.
Between now and early April, these are common bees in our area. The first native bee I saw this year was a digger, visiting a rosemary shrub. I also saw the one below visiting yellow jessamine on the fence at WFSU.
In my yard, blueberry diggers visit blueberry flowers, but they love Florida betony and have visited a few other flowers as well. I interviewed a bee researcher last year and learned that, while specialists may visit different flowers to drink nectar, their offspring can typically only eat the pollen of their host plants.
Like the sandhills cellophane bee, blueberry diggers time their flying to the blooming of their host plant. Down in their nests, they sense some change in the weather- temperature, humidity- that indicates the season in which blueberry shrubs make flowers. They then dig their way out to search for those flowers.
They’re also built for those bell-shaped flowers. Blueberry and fetterbush flowers don’t give up their pollen easily. Diggers are masters of buzz pollination, also known as sonication. They vibrate their wing muscles between 100 and 500 Hertz, and the vibrations loosen the pollen. Nonnative honeybees are often deployed to pollinate blueberries, but they don’t sonicate, so they’re much less efficient at it. Their advantage is that they are numerous.
That kind of looks like a bumblebee
I photograph a lot of bees and share them to social media. Some have a distinct look, while many are variations on a theme. I imagine they blur together to a lot of folks.
I don’t spend much time writing about species identification. There are entomologists who are better qualified to do that. But, there is a quick way to tell blueberry diggers apart from the more common lookalikes.
The simplest way to tell them apart are their abdomens (their bottom sections). I like to say that bumblebees have fuzzy butts. Blueberry diggers are similar in size to smaller common eastern bumblebees, but they have smooth abdomens.
If the bee has a smooth abdomen and is larger than the other bees, it is likely a carpenter bee. The male carpenter-mimic leaf cutter is smaller and has a smooth abdomen, but has a leaner shape than a blueberry digger. It also flies later in the year than blueberry diggers.
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.
I didn’t see many carpenter bees, but…
Without carpenter bees to chase off the other bees, I was able to take better pollination photos. I did, however, see evidence of these large, native bees.
Sonication is an adaptation that works for some bees, while others feed from long, tubular flowers with long probosces (something like a tongue). I’ve also seen ant-sized bees climb inside of those same flowers. Carpenter bees are too large to hang from flowers to feed from them. Instead, they stand atop them and use the same mandibles they use to dig out nests in wood, and they cut the flowers to take pollen.
Brown-headed nuthatches are nesting, too
During my visit to this site, I kept hearing a familiar squeak-toy bird call. Finally, near a dead standing tree (also known as a snag), I saw this:
A couple of years ago, I produced a video about a brown-headed nuthatch study at Tall Timbers. Jim Cox, retired head of the Stoddard Bird Lab, shared that nuthatches start nesting around now, when it’s too cold for snakes to be consistently active. Nuthatches nest exclusively in snags, and their cavities are usually about eye-level or slightly higher. I’m 6’2″, but this nest is a couple feet taller than I am. It’s a height easily reached by a climbing snake.
Brown-headed nuthatches are one of three bird species endemic to longleaf/ wiregrass and related ecosystems. The other two are Bachman’s sparrows and red cockaded woodpeckers. Nuthatches excavate nests with their sharp beaks, which other bird species will later use.
Odds and ends in a north Florida sandhill
It’s not a Florida sandhill without harvester ants. They adorn their nests with bits of charred pine needles and other vegetation.
Cloudless sulfurs are found throughout Florida, but one of their host plants is ubiquitous in Sandhills: partridge pea (Chamaecrista fasciculata).
Another ubiquitous sandhill plant. Last year’s rare bee feature was the prickly pear longhorn bee. I was hoping to scout new locations for the bee in April and May, and wouldn’t it be perfect if it was here? I may also check the sandhill restoration sites along the Crooked Creek steephead ravine in Gadsden County. This was the topic of our most recent episode of Coast to Canopy.
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