What’s the buzz with native bees? Washington’s Bee Atlas fixes to find out

Last winter, more than 60% of commercial honeybee colonies in the United States died. It was the largest recorded loss in American history.

“It was kind of a failure of control all at once,” Katie Buckley, who works with pollinators for the Washington State Department of Agriculture, said.

The issues afflicting honeybees are the heart of an ongoing effort to better understand Washington’s native bees better.

It’s called the Washington Bee Atlas, which kicked off with legislative funding in 2023. It aims to create a public, online repository of native bees that have been collected in the state.

Director of the atlas, Karen Wright, said that U.S. farmers have long relied on the European honeybee for crop pollination because it is a domesticated and easily manipulated species. However, ne