More than 400 native bee species call New Jersey home, and our own honeybees live alongside them. One in three bites of food depends on this workforce, and most people cannot name five of them.
The honeybee is the one everyone knows, and it is not even native. Behind it stand more than four hundred wild species that were pollinating New Jersey long before anyone kept a hive: bumble bees, sweat bees, miner bees, leafcutters, most of them nesting in bare ground and dead stems, many locked to a handful of plants. We keep honeybees ourselves, and we plant for the four hundred.
Bumble bees, sweat bees, miner bees, leafcutters, masons
No hive, no honey, almost never a sting. Just four hundred species doing the quiet work New Jersey runs on.
Most native bees live nothing like a honeybee. Around seven in ten nest in bare, sunny ground; most of the rest use hollow stems and beetle holes in dead wood. Nearly all are solitary, a single female provisioning her own nest, which is why a mulched-and-sprayed yard with nowhere to dig is empty of them no matter what it has in bloom.
Some of them do things no honeybee can. Bumble bees grab a flower and buzz at just the right pitch to shake the pollen loose. Blueberries, our state's signature crop, are built for exactly that, which is why the wild bees in a blueberry field earn their keep alongside every rented hive.
And when a native bee is a specialist, one in four of them, there is no substitute. The rusty patched bumble bee used to live here. It has not been seen in New Jersey since 2000, and it is gone from about 87 percent of the range it once held.
| Species in NJ | More than 400 |
| Nesting | ~70% in bare ground |
| Social life | Mostly solitary |
| Signature skill | Buzz pollination |
| Lost from NJ | Rusty patched bumble bee, since 2000 |
Apis mellifera
The honeybee is livestock, brought from Europe centuries ago. Supporting it and supporting wild bees are related goals, not the same goal.
We run our own hives, and we love them. Honeybees are extraordinary animals: a superorganism of tens of thousands, dancing map directions to each other, adding about fifteen billion dollars a year to American crop value. They are also in real trouble, with US beekeepers now losing roughly four colonies in ten in a typical year.
But here is the part most pollinator talk skips, and we will not: a hive of honeybees does not save a single wild bee. Crowded colonies can pass parasites and disease into wild bumble bee populations and compete with them for food. Keeping bees is agriculture. Planting habitat is conservation. We do both, and we keep the two straight.
Want to know the hive from the inside? Our free printable Bee Field Guide covers the queen, the workers, the drones, and the waggle dance.
| Origin | Europe, colonial era |
| Status | Managed livestock |
| US crop value | About $15B a year |
| Typical annual colony loss | Roughly 4 in 10 |
The plant list is half the answer. The other half is letting your yard be a place a bee can actually live, and that part costs nothing at all.
Every plant here is native to our region. Together they run from the first pollen of March to the last nectar before the new queens dig in for winter, with the specialists covered along the way.
| Plant | Blooms | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Pussy willowSalix discolor | March to April | First pollen of the year, right when bumble bee queens wake up |
| Golden AlexandersZizia aurea | April to June | Carries the early season until summer arrives |
| Wild blue indigoBaptisia australis | May to June | Built for big bees; a bumble bee favorite |
| Wild bergamotMonarda fistulosa | June to September | Long summer bloom for long-tongued bees |
| Mountain mintPycnanthemum muticum | July to September | The most bee-visited plant we grow. Period |
| Partridge peaChamaecrista fasciculata | July to September | Buzz-pollinated, and it loves our sandy soil |
| GoldenrodSolidago species | August to October | Fall mainstay; feeds the specialist miner bees |
| New England asterSymphyotrichum novae-angliae | August to October | Last call before the new queens hibernate |
Every unsprayed native planting is forage, and every bare sunny patch is a nest site. Help us build more of both.
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