Playin' Outside

San Antonio's Festival of Flowers will resume this Saturday, June 3, 2023, after a break of three years.    I've been given the opportunity to share how I garden, as well as a general overview of our native bees.   A link to a Google doc containing my handout (the info dense slides from my presentation) follows this list of resources.  Note that if you didn't attend, some of the handout pages may not make complete sense.     Hyperlinks to more resources: https://www.wildbeestexas.com/ https://w3.biosci.utexas.edu/jha/research/native-bee-communities https://www.wildflower.org/collections/collection.php?collection=TX_central https://www.pollinator.org/pollinator.org/assets/generalFiles/BeginnerBeeFieldGuide_11March2022_LowRez.pdf https://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/wild/wildlife_diversity/nongame/native-pollinators/bumblebee-id.phtml https://www.pollinatorphotos.com/ https://www.homegrownnationalpark.org/       https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yOIlJFjzgAlhc5nfTXkqrVutPxWHLwfQ/vie

There are over 20,000 bee species in the world.  Of those, close to 4,500 are considered native to the U.S., and up to 1000 are native to Texas (I typically say “over 800”). They’re currently classified into seven families, of which six are represented in Texas. Our native bees range in size from nearly an inch long down to smaller than a peppercorn. I’ve tried to limit the scope of this article to the least I can say given that “the native bees of Texas” is a broad topic well suited to the size of our state. As for that iconic golden yellow and black striped honey maker, the honey bee ( Apis mellifera ) is non-native but well established. As described by Michael Engle in 2009, it also appears to have at least one extinct ancestor ( A. nearctica ) that lived in North America 14 million years ago. Our challenge is that those hairy-eyed honey bees get all the love, and only recently have natives been recognized for their intrinsic value to local biomes and as the workhorse