The Fairy Poppy Bee's Dance of Fragility and Resilience
Discover one of the 1600 species of native California bees and the intimate portraits in conservation photographer Krystle Hickman's forthcoming book, The ABCs of California Native Bees
If you’re looking to save the bees, you need to look closer. “Honey bees are pretty horrible for the ecosystem,” says conservation photographer, NHM Community Science Museum Associate, National Geographic Explorer, and native bee educator, Krystle Hickman.
Native bees do the heavy lifting of pollination through partnerships with native plants that undergird the state’s incredible variety of endemic species, life found here and nowhere else on the planet. While they produce the sweet stuff, the ever-present western honeybee’s buzz drowns out California’s native bees and, like the Perdita interrupta pictured above, their more specialized pollinator relationship with native plants.
Commonly known as the California fairy poppy bees, they earned their namesake by only collecting pollen from our state flower. Scientists used to believe these tiny bees were similarly tethered to Crypantha flowers to slake their thirst for nectar, which poppies don’t produce. However, Hickman observed that these tiny bees also drink from other flowers nearby.
It’s just one of the observations she’s made while photographing some of California’s 1600 native bees, an obsession that’s unearthed new discoveries about our bees and produced the first-ever photographs of some of the rarest bees in the state. In her new book, The ABCs of California Native Bees, Hickman showcases one bee for each letter of the alphabet to spotlight their stunning diversity and the threats they face from things like habitat destruction, human-caused climate change, and wildfires.
Hickman first encountered the fairy poppy bee in the chaparral habitat of a friend’s Alta Dena backyard. Their native plants had attracted a number of endemic pollinators until January’s Eaton Fire burned through their home along with thousands of others in the area. They didn’t know what would be left in the ashes, so the bright orange blooms were a welcome surprise, and the Perdita interrupta even more so.
The tiny bees likely survived thanks to their underground nests, but of course, they couldn’t come back without the fire-adapted poppies, the resilience and fragility of these native species. Hickman sums it up nicely: “If you do want to save the bees, it's not specifically about the bees. It's about saving their entire ecosystem.”
Discover more about Hickman’s work and preorder The ABCs of California Native Bees below.
