As part of our work with on-farm beneficials, we have tallied bees in various circumstances. While some of that information is presented in individual project reports, we have assembled the following resources:
Our Home-cooked Resourcs.
Video recording of “The Wonderful World of Bees” by Timo Wayman (FEP entomology intern 2022).
Bee list: A working list of the bee species that we or obliging scientists have found in our area. It is probably far from complete.
A 2012 bee blog posting: This describes some of our region’s common species. Plenty of photos.
A 2022 bee blog posting profiling some of the bee families in the neighborhood.
A report about on-farm native bees in Columbia County: This is the work of Martin Holdrege, a graduate of Hawthorne Valley School, who worked with us for several years. During his last couple years at HVS he focused his efforts on studying native on-farm bees. The materials below are his summaries of that work. Martin himself is also a great source of information. He’s been moving around, but we’ll gladly put you in touch with him.;
Internet Resources we’ve appreciated.
The Bee Genera of Eastern Canada, by Laurence Packer, Julio A. Genaro and Cory S. Sheffield, has a nice summary of native bee identification and natural history.
Status of Pollinators in North America can be read on-line for free.
A Cornell website that has info about bees, especially concerning bees found in NY.
The Discover Life website has excellent keys for bee ID in the eastern US. These are the keys we use for most of our ID work. There are also plenty of photographs of bees.
The Pollinator Partnership’s website has a lot of info on native and Honey Bees.
Farming for Bees, by the Xerces Society, is a wonderful article about native bee conservation, management and biology on farms. (This is a pdf document.)
Paper on Bee Decline by leading North American bee researchers.
Specialist Bees, an interesting account of those bees who are closely tied to one or a few species of native plants.