Washington Bee Atlas volunteers look for native bees at a Whitman County farm in May 2024.
Washington Department of Agriculture/Karla Salp
Washington’s first statewide survey of bees has found dozens of species new to the state.
Several long-lost species, turned up by citizen-scientists with nets and specimen jars, had not been seen in Washington for a century or more.
The state is home to at least 600 native species of bees, important pollinators for crops like beans, blueberries, squash and tomatoes as well as wild plants.
Little is known about most of the region’s bee species, including where their populations can be found.
“Surveying the whole state over all of the seasons is a monumental task,” said Karla Salp of Port Angeles, one of 150 volunteers who spent “many, many hours” driving around the state, netting and documenting rare bees for the Washington Department of Agriculture’s Washington Bee Atlas.
“Some are extremely tiny. I’m talking about three or four millimeters maybe,” said Salp, whose day job is serving as spokesperson for the agriculture department. “People might see these things flying around and think that they’re gnats, and they’re actually bees that are out there pollinating.”
Anthidium formosum, a species of wool-carder bee, was last documented in Washington state in 1882 until Washington Bee Atlas volunteers found it again.
Washington State Department of Agriculture
Taxonomists are still working through the 50,000 specimens that volunteers turned in. So far, they have identified 30 new-to-Washington species and 14 species that had not been reported in the state in half a century or more.
One small species called the white-banded sweat bee (Lasioglossum leucozonium) had not been documented in Washington since 1906 —until a volunteer near Ephrata turned it up.
A species of wool-carder bee (a group of bee species that build their tiny nests with plant hairs) was last documented in the state in 1882. Volunteers in three Central Washington counties netted specimens of it for the bee atlas. The species, Anthidium formosum, is rare enough that it has no common name.
According to agriculture officials, the state’s food security depends on its native bees.
“Reliance on honeybees alone puts food supplies in a precarious position,” a department press release says.
Honeybees are not native to North America.
The species known as Calliopsis scitula or the charming mining bee, shown carrying a load of pollen, had never been documented in Washington state before Washington Bee Atlas volunteers found it in Douglas and Grant counties.
Washington State Department of Agriculture
While domesticated honeybees pollinate many crops, enabling them to produce fruit and seeds, commercial beekeepers have been witnessing their honeybee colonies collapsing. More than half of the managed honeybee colonies in the U.S. appear to have experienced mass die-offs in 2024 and 2025, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association.
By some estimates, wild insects pollinate more than $5 billion in crops annually in the U.S.
The nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity says that more than half of native bee species for which data is available are declining in population in the U.S., while one in four are threatened with extinction.
Wild bees face threats including habitat loss, pesticides and climate change.
In addition, Utah State University biologists estimate that motor vehicles likely kill tens of millions of bees in the Western United States every day.
“It is hard to get a handle on what exactly is happening with a lot of the bee species,” Washington State University entomology professor Elizabeth Murray said.
The Wasington Bee Atlas aims to provide a baseline of data to inform efforts to conserve bees and all the benefits they provide.
Murray says Pacific Northwest bees are very diverse.
“Big to small. Furry, hairy, to hardly having any hair. Different colors,” Murray said. “There’s a lot of variety out there, and they’re doing a lot of work out in the ecosystem and also in agricultural systems.”
The white-banded sweat bee (Lasioglossum leucozonium) had not been documented in Washington since 1906—until a Washington Bee Atlas volunteer found one near Ephrata.
Washington State Department of Agriculture
Murray manages Washington State University’s insect museum, the state’s largest insect collection, with about 3 million specimens, established in 1892. The bees collected and pinned by atlas volunteers will go to the museum, labeled along with their location, timing and the host plant they were found on.
The atlas’s new finds included four species of leaf-cutting cuckoo bees and two species of sweat bees, all small, solitary insects.
Most of the atlas’s discoveries and rediscoveries came from Central and Eastern Washington.
“There hasn’t been a lot of looking for bees in many of those areas,” Salp said. “But also, bees really like hot, dry weather, and you don’t get as much of that in Western Washington.”
Salp said many areas of the state have never been surveyed for bees, and the agriculture department is looking for more volunteers to help fill in the gaps.
John Ryan is a reporter with KUOW. This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
It is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit our journalism partnerships page.
