Bee Smarter - USGS Native Bee Lab Tour

Learn about our native bees with the experts at the USGS Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Program, a unique federal research facility dedicated entirely to surveying, identifying, and conserving North America’s roughly 4,000 species of native bees. These researchers are the only ones 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, this group designs and develops large- and small-scale surveys for native bees, including identification tools and keys, and specialized netting and trap methods, all essential for identifying and documenting local species. The lab also documents the crucial 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 lab houses an expansive physical collection of over 750,000 pinned and sorted native bee specimens from all 50 states, US territories, and international regions.
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.