As the sun strikes the basil plant in bloom, it teems with life. Stop and watch – honeybees, tiny native bees, butterflies, and an occasional bumble bee stop to sip the nectar of the tiny flowers.
Did you know that there are over 4000 species of native bee in North America, and over 800 in the Oklahoma/Texas blackland prairie? They include leaf cutter bees, ground bees, mason bees, among so many others. Honeybees (imported from Europe) are the only ones that produce honey. The others are solitary and don’t live in hives – they may have colonies of several holes together, but they do not cooperate like the bees in a hive. Each (female) bee finds nectar and pollen, puts them in a nest, lays her egg and seals it off, then repeats the process until her hole or nest is filled. Then she dies. Interestingly, the mason bee lays male eggs toward the last of her hole so that they emerge first and can wait around for the females to emerge to breed. Most native bees do not sting.
A bit of trivia – mason bees can nest in small tubes about the size of a drinking straw. You may have seen bee nests sold in nurseries – several hollow bamboo or other reeds bound together. Because the nest is compact, commercial orchardists in California are now hiring mason bees for pollinating their crops (like almonds) because the beekeeper can put the nest in cool storage, and time the warming of it about 30 days before they want the bees to emerge. Then, they place the nest in the middle of an orchard. The honeybee can travel up to 2 miles, looking for nectar. The mason bee only goes about ½ mile, so it pollinates the orchard more thoroughly and crop yields can increase by as much as 15%.
When I visited Cozumel in early 2020, I was surprised to learn that they have a native bee that produces honey! The bees build their hives in logs, but the output is only as much as a liter of honey for a small log. Therefore, the honey was very valuable and available only to the upper classes (to mix with cocoa powder and water for a rich chocolate drink!).