THE BUZZ ON WILD BEES

Honeybees get most of the attention but make up only a small fraction of the number of bee species on our planet; a salute to the rest is in order.

Going all in on reader appeal, Vermond profiles a representative sampling of carpenter bees, sweat bees, diggers, and other “gentle little fuzz-buckets” classed as “wild solitary bees,” which never swarm, rarely sting, and actually constitute 90% of all the bees on Earth. As she writes, they are the main pollinators for many common foodstuffs from blueberries to potatoes and tomatoes. Some collect flower oils rather than pollen, produce a cellophane-like protective coating for their nests, and exhibit other unexpected behaviors; vulture bees even eat carrion and regurgitate it later to feed their offspring. “What’s the only real difference between this stuff and the honey of a honeybee? It’s made of rotten flesh, not plants,” writes Vermond. Steube’s close-up, detailed portraits of a representative dozen or so types of wild bees hovering over a variety of flowers offer a good sense of the industrious clan’s broad range of both common and distinctive features. Bee predators and parasites, like the “adorable” bee flies that bomb nests with their own eggs, also earn nods, and closing projects and practices invite concerned young activists to “BEE part of the solution" to declining insect populations.

Bee-guiling and informative.