Bees

Pinnacles National Monument’s abundant wildflowers are world-famous. Less well-known but equally impressive are the bees that tend to these flowers. Without bee pollination, hundreds of plant species from buckwheat to poppies wouldn’t be able to reproduce. And thanks, in part, to a nearly year-long flowering season, Pinnacles hosts a lot of bees—more species than any other surveyed area its size on Earth. According to a late-90s study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Logan Bee Lab in Utah, nearly 400 bee species live in the park’s 25 square-miles. Between 2011 and 2012, researchers from Utah State University will return to the park to find even more.

Pinnacles’ bees come in all shapes, colors and sizes from tiny sweat bees—bees that eat the salt off sweating mammals--to big bumblebees. While the iconic and non-native European honeybee (Apis mellifera) is plentiful here, most of Pinnacles’ bees live on their own, not in colonies, and most build their nests in the dirt. Some—called kleptoparasites or cuckoo bees—only lay their eggs in other bees’ nests. Their larvae pack a big punch and gobble down the nutrients the nest’s rightful occupants need to survive.