WSDA Blog

Date: Tuesday, June 3, 2025

Author: Dr. Katie Buckley, Pollinator Health Coordinator

You see them sometimes, as you’re driving down the highway. They’re in the fields, they’re in the orchards, they’re in the news, they’re in your own backyard! Some are easily recognizable, others not so much. Yet they are critical to our state’s agriculture and can sometimes be used to help degraded ecosystems. Some are new to being managed, and others humans have lived with for thousands of years. They are our state’s managed pollinators.

Honey bees

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are the familiar ones. Humans have been stealing their honey since before we were Homo sapiens. The first kept honey bees were in ancient Egypt, where they kept bees in mud or clay pipes. Most beekeepers now use the Langstroth hive, developed in 1852, as it was among the first hives that didn’t require a beekeeper to kill their bees to collect honey. Today, commercial beekeepers make most of their money not from beeswax or honey sales, but from pollination services. Their hives are trucked all over the country, from California’s almonds to Florida’s blueberries, Washington’s apples and cherries to North Dakota clover. They are moved at night when the bees are all back in their hive and won’t be left behind. They are also under a lot of stress.

Beekeeping a hundred or even fifty years ago was very different from today. There were brood diseases (brood are the baby bees) that needed to be monitored for, but mostly beekeeping was about swarm management. Tracheal mite was the first major pest issue, but it was a pale shadow of what has become the dominant issue for beekeepers: varroa mite. If you were the size of a honey bee, a varroa mite would be an external parasite the size of your fist, that feeds off your fat stores. While that might sound like a good way to lose weight, they also transmit deadly viruses, and if left unchecked are deadly to bees in their own right. That’s what happened this winter, when miticide-resistant varroa mites multiplied and spread diseases, killing about 1.7 million colonies — a whopping 60% of total honey bee hives in the country.  

Honey bees also must deal with pesticide exposure, habitat loss, poor nutrition (which is tied to habitat loss), and may soon face a new parasitic mite that can outcompete varroa mite, the Tropilaelaps mite. It has not been found in North or South America yet, but has been spreading across Asia into Europe in recent years. But we learned from varroa mites, and there is research underway to learn how to detect and manage Tropilaelaps mite before it arrives in the United States.

Other managed bees

With all these issues, it’s no wonder that there’s interest in alternative managed pollinators. Honey bees also aren’t the best pollinators of certain crops. One example is tomatoes, which require buzz pollination. Honey bees don’t buzz pollinate, but bumble bees do. The native Bombus vosnenskii and Bombus bifarius are raised commercially for pollination services on the West Coast, mostly for greenhouse tomato pollination. Bumble bees are social species much like honey bees, but unlike honey bees, only the mated queens overwinter. These queens then need to create a nest, care for their brood, and do all the foraging for nectar and pollen by herself until her first offspring emerge as adults. Commercially they are typically kept in cardboard or wood boxes called quads (as there are usually four colonies in one quad).

Some managed bees are even more specialized. Alkali bees (Nomia melanderi) and alfalfa leafcutter bees (Megachile rotundata) are used to produce alfalfa seed. Alkali bees are native to the American West, and while solitary (the females lay eggs on pollen balls in single cells they’ve dug out themselves, then they seal the nest cell for the offspring to emerge the next year), alkali bees tend to nest in very specific places in large numbers. They prefer a specific type of salty soil and can be enticed to nest in specific areas by creating the soil conditions they like. Walla Walla is renowned for their beds of alkali bees.

Alfalfa leafcutter bees were brought over from Europe and are also solitary bees like the alkali bee, though managed bees nest in holes predrilled in wood and create individual cells for each egg with pieces of leaves. You might spot these boards with hundreds of holes drilled in them when driving by alfalfa fields.

Finally there are the mason bees or blue orchard bees (Osmia species). These bees emerge very early in the spring and are very efficient pollinators of early blooming fruit trees like apples, pears, cherries, and other stone fruit. Also solitary, these bees section off cells in hollow reeds with mud. Clusters of bamboo reeds may be scattered throughout orchards, tied to branches and tucked up out of the way.

Bumble bees, alkali bees, and leaf cutter bees may not have to deal with varroa or Tropilaelaps mites, but even they can be impacted by pesticides, habitat loss, their own diseases and parasites, and severe weather events. If you are interested in learning more about honey bee beekeeping, join your local beekeeping club. To learn more about other managed bees, the Orchard Bee Association and the Washington Native Bee Society may be able to help depending on your interests.

Helping bees

Some people think the best way to help bees is to become a beekeeper. But only keep bees if you are interested in the pollination services or products like honey and wax that they provide. It can be a lot of work to keep any kind of bees, and failing to properly manage them could result in making pest and disease issues worse, not better. Not everyone needs to keep bees, but everyone can do something to help them!

If you want to help bees, the best thing you can do is plant more flowers! Loss of habitat is a common challenge for managed and wild bees. This can be as simple as not mowing your yard for part of the year and allowing the naturally occurring clovers, vetches, and daisies to bloom.

Also, reduce and be mindful of pesticide use. Be sure to read and follow the label, which will have information about protecting honey bees if the product you are using may impact them.

Finally, supporting bees can be as easy as buying some local honey and just appreciating the hard work bees do for us. They don’t even take weekends off!

Visit agr.wa.gov/pollinators to learn more about WSDA’s work to support Washington’s pollinators.