Visit the USWFS Pollinator Team at the USGS Bee Lab

Learn about our native bees with the FWS Pollinator experts at the USGS Bee Lab, a unique federal facility dedicated entirely to supporting science for North America’s roughly 4,000 species of native bees. These are the only biologists within the Department of the Interior with the specific taxonomic expertise required to identify native bees down to the exact species level. With this expertise, the group supports research teams in designing surveys for native bees, provides identification tools and keys, and offers specialized training on field and laboratory methods, all essential for identifying and documenting local species.
The lab also documents relationships between individual bee species and the specific flowers they depend on, which is vital because roughly 30% of U.S. native bees are pollen specialists. The FWS Pollinator Team works with National Wildlife Refuges to manage protected habitats for pollinators and native plants.
We’ll walk around their gardens in search of bees, have a short intro to a bee ID lesson, and see their macrophotography setup. To build better identification keys, the lab takes ultra-high-resolution macro photographs of insects. They host a public catalog of over 4,500 images on the USGS Bee Lab Flickr Page.