Bees of North Florida and South Georgia

This is a collection of bees I’ve photographed in my yard, as well as on shoots around our area. Florida has over 300 native species of bees, and there are over 500 in Georgia. This page will not list all of them! Instead, you’ll see the bees that might commonly visit our yards, and maybe a couple that are less common. I’ll keep adding as I photograph new species, or witness interesting behaviors.

Even if you don’t see a photo of the specific bee you saw in your yard, maybe you’ll see the type. Sometimes, the best we can do is identify a genus of bees, or a tribe. Some bees need several detailed photos, or a microscope, to differentiate between related species. This page organizes bees into their families. So you might be able to identify that you have a leafcutter, or a sweat bee.

And you might also check out the fly page (once we have it up- we’re incrementally adding these insect species pages throughout 2020). Hoverflies and bee flies mimic bees, and can be easily confused for them at a quick glance.

Carpenter Bees

Carpenter bees excavate their nests in dead wood, which, in our yards, can mean fences or any other (usually unfinished) wood structures in your yard. Understandably, some people regard them as pests. If you can tolerate a few perfectly round holes in a fence post, they are pollinators, and their nests are used by other pollinators as well.

The nest above was abandoned by the carpenter bee that made it. A four-toothed mason wasp then took over, along with a cuckoo wasp that laid its eggs with those of the mason wasp. Both wasps are pollinators, and I’ve seen mason wasps hunt moth caterpillars in the yard.

One last note about carpenter bees. They look, at first, like large bumblebees. The easiest way to differentiate between the two is the abdomen. As I tell the kids, bumblebees have fuzzy “butts,” where carpenter bees have smooth abdomens. But, as we’ll see below, there is one other bee species in the area that mimics carpenter bees and their “smooth butts.”

Eastern carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica)

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There are two species we’re likely to see in our area. The males of both species are similar, though the southern carpenter bee has a purplish abdomen.

Southern Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa micans)

Here we see the female southern carpenter bee, which is all black with a purplish tinge. Female eastern carpenter bees, on the other hand, look much like their males.

Bumblebees

Bumblebees are both common and conspicuous among our native bees. Not only are they widespread, but are large enough to notice even on higher up tree flowers.

They are social bees. In the fall, queens and males leave the nest and mate. The queen is the only bumblebee to survive through the winter, carrying next year’s colony within her as she lies dormant in leaf litter. In the spring, she emerges and creates a new colony. The leaves we let lie in the winter harbor numerous insects, as dormant adults, larvae, and pupae.

Eastern Bumblebee (Bombus impatiens)

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Here is the bumblebee species you’re most likely to see in your north Florida yard. It’s a ground nesting species, where the American bumblebee nests above ground.

Note the fuzzy abdomen and pollen sacs on the hindmost legs.

American bumblebee (Bombus pensylvanicus)

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American bumblebees were once the most common bumblebee species in the US. But they have declined over the last several decades, and are now federally listed as Vulnerable. Unlike other bumblebees, they nest above ground. In our segment on them last year, they had taken over a purple martin gourd.

They are larger than eastern bumblebees, and have a striped yellow patch on their abdomens.

The American Bumblebee in the WFSU Ecology Blog

• In August 2019, we visited a beekeeper who had taken in an American bumblebee nest.
• In July 2020, We found an American bumblebee at Elinor Klapp-Phipps Park.

Leafcutter, Mason, and Resin Bees

This is a family of solitary nesting bees with similar habits. They make use of existing tunnel structures, such as those left by wood boring beetles or insects that tunnel in the ground. Leaf cutters will, as their name suggests, cut leaves to line these tunnels and build their nests. Mason bees collect sediment to seal their tunnels, much like mason wasps. Resin bees use resin to seal their nests.

Carpenter-mimic leafcutter bee (Megachile xylocopoides)

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With its smooth abdomen and yellow hair, the male carpenter-mimic leafcutter looks much like a smaller carpenter bee. Note the narrower wing shape and flatter abdomen, and the shape of the head compared to the carpenter. The female mimics the female southern carpenter bee, with an all black body and less hair than the male.

Carpenter-mimic leafcutter bees on the WFSU Ecology Blog

• We first saw this bee on the Backyard Blog. It was a regular presence in our yard in May and June of 2020. Like a carpenter bee, it was aggressive towards other pollinators in our flower patch, especially wasps.
• In July of 2020, I saw the female when shooting pollinator footage at Elinor Klapp-Phipps Park.

Subgenus Chelostomoides

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This is another species of leafcutter I spotted while shooting video in Klapp-Phipps Park in Tallahassee. I couldn’t narrow the ID to anything more specific than genus, which isn’t uncommon for bees.

Flat-Tailed and Petulant Leafcutter Bees

Here are two very similar looking leafcutters. The images above and below come from two different dates at Klapp-Phipps Park, and I had at first thought they were both flat-tailed leafcutter bees. After loading the images into iNaturalist, it appears they might be two different species. Bee researcher Dr. John Ascher of the National University of Singapore is very active on iNaturalist, and suggested petulant leafcutter for the bee above.

Another user confirmed flat-tailed leafcutter (Megachile mendica) for the images below, which were taken from video and are not as high resolution as the one above. Looking at images of both bees in Google image searches, and on their Discover Life pages, the differences seem to be highly technical. Maybe more technical than I’m ready to dive into and learn about for the amount of time I have to write this post; but, like I keep saying, I’ll keep returning to these pages with new photos and any other information I learn.

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Perplexing rotund-resin bee (Anthidiellum perplexum)

I have only one image of this bee, from the same busy patch of sensitive plants at Klapp-Phipps, and within a few minutes of seeing the leafcutter bees above.

Longhorn Bees

Two-spotted long-horned bee (Melissodes bimaculatus)

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This bee was a constant presence in our yard in May and June of 2020, peaking at four or five individuals. It fed off a large variety of flowers of different shapes and sizes, hanging from salvia, pentas, or fanpetal flowers, or sitting on larger tickseed and coneflower flowers. This generalist diet might account, in part, for their wide range as a species, covering half of the United States.

Sweat Bees

This is a large and diverse family of bees. Sweat bees are some of the smaller bees we see on our flowers, from the gnat sized Dialictus bees to the somewhat larger and more colorful Augochlorini. They are said to be attracted to human sweat.

Lassioglossum, subgenus Dialictus

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Dialictus is a subgenus of the Lasioglossum genus, and it has hundreds of very similar looking bees. They are difficult to differentiate, even with a microscope. I see quite a few in my yard, and some are slightly larger than others. I figure, based on size, that I have at least two species. Or maybe it’s one species with larger males or females?

Poey’s Furrow Bee (Halictus Poeyi)

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Poey’s furrow bees are just a little larger than the largest Dialictus in our yard, and they often use the same flowers. The furrow bees have a more pronounced yellow and black striping on the abdomens, and big, thick heads. I’ve seen as many as two or three at a time in our yard, with two sometimes sharing a larger flower.

Augochlorini tribe

There are two or three species we’re likely to see in our area, and these are very much similar looking. Augochlorine bees are solitary nesters.

The photo above was submitted to iNaturalist and confirmed to be a pure green sweat bee (Augochlora pura). Another possibility in our area is the metallic-epauletted sweat bee (Augochloropsis metallica).

Below are a few photos of Augochlorine sweat bees. I’m noticing that very few get species-level confirmations on iNaturalist. One of the bees below has a deep blue color, but that’s a normal color variation for these bees. They also resemble the female brown-winged striped-sweat bee (which we’ll see next), but those have a few features that make them easier to identify.

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Brown-winged striped sweat bee (Agapostemon splendens)

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The male brown-winged striped sweat bee is unmistakable. In August of 2019 and 2020, I saw larger and larger numbers of the males on flower patches in our yard. I saw females, which have a similar green coloring to the Augochlorine bees, as early as June in 2020. And perhaps I’d always seen them this early. This was the first year that I had close photos of both, and noticed their subtle differences.

One subtle difference is the wings. Female brown-winged striped sweat bees have murkier wings than Augochlorine bees. If you scroll up to the photo of the pure green sweat bee, its wings look more like they’re made of glass panes. Another difference is that the female brown-winged striped sweat bee has more pronounced stripes on its abdomen:

Sweat bees are ground nesters, though they may also nest in rotting wood. In July of 2019, I removed an old wooden bench from the yard, and a green sweat bee flew out. I followed it as it appeared to search the ground for a new nesting area. If you have space for a brush pile in your yard, for a place to put a nice sized fallen branch to let sit and rot, this is one of a few different insects that would make use of that habitat.

Cuckoo Bees

I’ve only seen one of these bees in our area. There are only two iNaturalist observations for cuckoo bees in Leon County, and one is the photo below. But we are well within the range of a few of its species, and I see that the genus Triepeolus has the most research grade observations in Florida.

I observed the bee above in Klapp-Phipps park, and Dr. John Ascher identified it as a member of the Triepeolus genus.

Like cuckoo wasps (which are common in my yard), cuckoo bees are known as brood parasites. This means they lay their eggs with the eggs of other bees, whom their larvae consume.

Lively cuckoo bee (Nomada fervida) 

I first photographed this bee in our yard, in August 2020.

Mining Bees

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I saw this bee one time in my yard, tackling some shriveled flowers on the pavement. Dr. Ascher suggested the subgenus Archiandrena in iNaturalist.

Western honeybee (Apis Mellifera)

I’ve saved these for last because they’re not native, though they are an important agricultural animal. Below is the most common honeybee we might see, the female worker bee. During the weeks that they’re alive, they move through a series of jobs, from tending larvae to, finally, seeking nectar to bring back to the hive, from which they make honey.

Below are the queen, the mother of all of the bees in the hive, and a drone. Drones are male bees, and are distinguished by their larger eyes, which give them the vision they need to spot a queen in flight. Their only job is to find a queen and mate.

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Honeybees build hexagonal cells in their hives. Some of those cells contain honey, and others larvae. Worker bees tend to the larvae until they’re almost ready to pupate (metamorphose into adults), and then the cells are capped. You can see larvae in the uncapped cells below.

Honeybees on the Ecology Blog

• In 2014, we kayaked the Dead Lakes and visited apiaries in the Wewahitchka area. The numerous tupelo swamps between the Chipola and Apalachicola Rivers make this the tupelo honey capital of the world.
• In 2019, Dr. Lee Bushong and his partner, FAMU Entomology PhD. student Worrel Diedrick took us into their hives. All of the photos of honeybees are from that shoot. They were also raising an American bumblebee colony.

Many of the photos above come from the Backyard Blog. WFSU Ecology producer Rob Diaz de Villegas has been chronicling the plants and animals in his yard since 2018, paying close attention to insects.

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