ggs compared to other insects, with a single female often laying less than 50 eggs before she dies. Male bees do not live long beyond mating, they do not collect pollen and have little value as pollinators.
While most of these wood-nesting and ground-nesting bees are solitary, some are gregarious, preferring to nest near others, a behavior that allows large aggregations to develop in favorable locations. Only a few tunnel and ground-nesting bee species ever develop truly social colonies, and often such behavior is environmentally dependent with some bees being social in one situation and being solitary in another. The one group of strictly social bees native to the United States is the group of approximately 45 bumble bee species.
The two habitat components need to be close enough together so that the bees can fly between them. The flight distance of a bee varies with the size of the bee. Small sweat bees and mining bees may not fly more than 200 or 300 yards from nest to forage area. Large bees (bumble bees, for example) can cross a mile or more of inhospitable, flower-less landscape to forage. But however large the bee, if it has to fly too far the effort begins to outweigh the benefits and the bee may either find somewhere else to nest or not survive in the landscape.
A third factor that influences habitat is insecticide exposure. To thrive, bees need minimal exposure to pesticides.
The Apidae are a large family of bees, comprising the common honey bees, stingless bees (which are also cultured for honey), carpenter bees, orchid bees, cuckoo bees, bumblebees, and various other less well-known groups. The family Apidae presently includes all the genera that were previously classified in the families Anthophoridae and Ctenoplectridae, and most of these are solitary species, though a few are also cleptoparasites. The four groups that were subfamilies in the old family Apidae are presently ranked as tribes within the subfamily Apinae. This trend has been taken to its extreme in a few recent classifications that pla