If you encounter one in the wild, don’t sweat it. It’s just seeking a sip of saline.
Halictidae are the second largest family of bees, and they can be found on every continent except Antarctica. You may have seen one yourself, buzzing around in beautiful metallic shimmers of blue, green, red and even purple.
Most of these beautiful bees — aka sweat bees — nest in the ground and the family has a wide range of distinctive behaviors and features. Some halictid bees are solitary, some have colonies, some are metallic, and some are even nocturnal.
Named aptly for their attraction to sweat, these bees seek out the dissolved salts and minerals in our perspiration. (Think about how we want to down a sports drink after a hard day of work.)
Sweat bees do important work, from pollinating alfalfa for livestock feed, to apples, stone fruits and sunflowers. In fact, they’re so important to alfalfa that some farmers have catered to a certain type of sweat bee, called the alkali bee. These bees prefer to live in salty mud, so farmers set aside some salty mud fields for them to burrow in and lay eggs.
With more than five hundred species of halictids in North America, there’s quite the variety. These bees are not aggressive by nature, and stings usually only happen if they’re disturbed or swatted by accident. Another interesting fact: Only the females sting.
So the next time one of these bees lands on you, perhaps just let it “bee” and take a sip as thanks for the hard work they do.
Want to learn more about pollinators? Join us March 8 for Spring Bloom, SAWS’ free annual gardening event! This year focuses on the pollinators that help us thrive — and how we can help them thrive in return.
The first 1,000 guests get a free WaterSaver plant to help feed our “bee-loved” friends.
