There are some new buzzworthy residents in town.

More than two dozen new and rare bee species turned up in the first year of a statewide project aimed at better understanding Washington’s native pollinators. Now, as the Bee Atlas project enters its second year, the Department of Agriculture is looking for more volunteers to help collect and identify what’s still out there.

“We’re already learning fascinating things about our native bees, and we’re only getting started,” says Karen Wright, pollinator taxonomist for the Washington State Department of Agriculture. “But we still need more help. Washington is a large state and there are some counties where we don’t have a single volunteer. We’d love to have more people trained and out there looking for and recording our native bees.”

The Washington Bee Atlas is modeled after the Oregon Bee Atlas, which began in 2019 as part of the broader Pacific Northwest Bumble Bee Atlas. That program started in 2018 and monitors bumble bee activity in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Washington remains part of the Pacific Northwest Bumble Bee Atlas, but launched its own Bee Atlas in July 2023 to better understand native bees in the state, identify which species are thriving, and determine which may need conservation support.

The project also tracks which plants native bees rely on, with the goal of developing seed mix recommendations for seed mixes to support pollinators. All of the latest bee data from Washington will be added to the Ecdysis research data portal, with plans for more ways to make the data usable by the public under discussion.

The Department of Agriculture began training program volunteers in 2023. Most bee collecting is done by volunteers trained to collect and pin museum-quality specimens, while recording the location and host plant where each bee was found. Specimens are submitted to Wright for identification, and those not used for education and outreach will eventually reside in the Washington State University entomology museum.

Aside from being over the age of 18, there are no prerequisites for new volunteers, as the program provides the necessary training.  

In 2024, 67 Washington Bee Atlas volunteers collected over 17,000 specimens on more than 600 different host plants. The project has identified at least 26 new or rare species in the state, with many of the collected bees yet to be identified.

According to the state Department of Agriculture, several remarkable discoveries have already been made. These include 15 species never before collected in Washington, a bee found in Yakima County that hadn’t been recorded in the state since 1917, and another found in both Yakima and Pierce counties that had never previously been found in western Washington.

Many of these bees were detected in central Washington, likely because most native bees have adapted to thrive in dry areas like the microclimates found east of the Cascade Mountains. 

Ten of the 26 new or rare species were collected in Chelan County. Eight of those bee species were discovered as part of a graduate research project conducted by a University of Washington student and a Washington Bee Atlas volunteer.

Other findings include:

8 new or rare species collected in Grant County
5 in Yakima County
4 in Kittitas County
2 in Okanogan County
1 each in Douglas, Thurston, Clark, Pierce, and Benton counties

Some species were collected in more than one county. 

“These are just our preliminary findings,” Wright says. “There are still many more bees to identify from what has been collected, not to mention lots of opportunities to find new or rare species.”

Washington State Standard is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Washington State Standard maintains editorial independence.