![]() ![]() Despite their small size, ligated sweat bees are among the four most important pollinators of commercial sunflowers. If you look carefully at the coneflowers in the park's Visitor Center garden, you might well see two or three of these wild bees on a single blossom. A ligated sweat bee is smaller than the head of a dime. They first appear in early spring and remain through mid-fall. Halictus sweat bees are a common sight in the park and at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. Some Halictus are solitary and others nest in semi-social groups that pass through multiple generations in a single summer. The bees nest in the ground, in loose soils. New York’s Halictus bees are generalist foragers that pollinate a broad range of wildflowers and garden flowers as well as commercial crops. Males lack scopal hairs and tend to have partially yellow legs and faces. Females have dark faces and dark legs covered with fine pale hairs, and they carry pollen on scopae (sticky brushes) located on their hind legs. Halictus sweat bees native to New York are small to very small, dark brown or black bees with pale stripes of hair on their abdomens. There are 25 species in the Americas, and 6 in the New York area. Halictus sweat bees are found throughout throughout the world. Below is a sampling of Halictus and Lasioglossum sweat bees inhabiting Rockefeller State Park Preserve and Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. In our area, dark sweat bees divide mainly into two large genuses - Halictus and Lasioglossum. Sweat bees shown in this guide represent six distinct sweat bee genera that can be grouped roughly by their salient characteristics: (1) iridescent green sweat bees, which are covered in Part I of this guide's section on sweat bees and (2) sweat bees, covered here in Part II, that are dark in color, often with striped abdomens or with a metallic sheen. Sweat bees come in a multitude of varieties and colors, and span 14 genera (genuses) within the United States. Sweat bees are also essential pollinators of native flora, appearing in all seasons in New York on an extensive array of flowering plants found in woodlands and fields. Sweat bees are a highly important group of wild pollinators, responsible for the pollination of an impressive range of commercial crops - among them squash, legumes, sunflowers, watermelons, apples, cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, tomatoes and peppers, to name but a few. Halictidae, tiny nonaggressive "sweat bees," comprise one of the seven bee families in the order Hymenoptera. They also minimize further negative impacts on wildlife and pollution of local water resources.SWEAT BEES. Native plants also assist in managing rainwater runoff and maintaining healthy soil as their root systems are deep and keep soil from being compacted. That means less supplemental watering, which can be wasteful, and pest problems that require toxic chemicals. ![]() They will thrive in the soils, moisture, and weather of your region. They help the environment the most when planted in places that match their growing requirements. By doing so, you’ll cut down on the amount of water, pesticides, and fertilizers you use. Replacing invasives with native plants reverses the dominance of non-beneficial plants in the landscape, a key contributor to habitat loss that has hurt many wildlife species. Not only do they destroy and crowd out native plants, but they don’t support local wildlife. Occasionally, they can even escape into the wild and become invasives that destroy natural habitats. ![]() Plants such as ornamental pear, taxus, barberry, as considered exotic plants that evolved in other parts of the world or were cultivated by humans into forms that don’t exist in nature do not support wildlife as well as native plants. Why should they replace such trees and shrubs? ![]()
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