Hi there! I’m a cellophane bee, also known as Colletes. There are about sixteen species of us in this area. Funny name, right? Unlike other bees that create a ball of pollen for their young, I make a pollen smoothie  and lay my egg in it. Without any intervention, the soup would absorb into the soil, so I make a cellophane-like bag to line each cell and fill it with pollen from your garden. You can spot us throughout the season, from early spring on maple flowers to late fall on goldenrod.

Visually, we might not stand out much. We’re generally hairier and a bit heavier than Andrena (mining) bees, which are also abundant in early spring. Like Andrena, we’re solitary and ground-nesting. Our faces are less round and more heart-shaped due to the angle of our eyes, and our abdomens are often distinctly banded. If you get a chance to see our tongues, you’ll notice they’re forked. We use them to paint the walls of our nest cells with the cellophane-like substance to keep water out. All in a day’s work!

Despite our name, you can call me HUNGRY most of all. Many of us bees are emerging from overwintering and we’re starving! We’ve evolved to emerge while our host plants are flowering. Whether we’re specialists or generalists for pollen, we visit a range of flowers with accessible nectar. Those of us emerging in April have few flowers to choose from in gardens, and this is where you can help us out, dear gardener!

Like many other bees, our tongues are short, so we can’t reach nectar at the base of tubular flowers. Even little grape hyacinths are too deep! Flowers that are open and shallow, like magnolia, are great for all types of pollinators because everyone can access the nectar.