By Sara Bushmann In May and June of 2010 and 2011, I collected
wild bees from 24 blueberry fields in Hancock County in the
towns of Orland, Penobscot, Sedgwick and Blue Hill. By “wild”
bees I mean any bee that is not a honeybee or a commercial
bumblebee. Most of the wild bees are native, occurring naturally
in Maine, but a few are not native and have been brought here by
humans at some point in time. The wild bees are generally small-
the size of a honeybee or less. The wild bees are mostly
solitary, living individually or maybe in aggregations, but
never forming the large colonies seen with honeybees. Naturally
occurring bumblebees are wild, and they live in fairly large,
social colonies, but I did not collect bumblebees. In the spring
the only bumblebees that are out in the blueberry fields are the
queens that are foraging for nectar and pollen before starting
to lay eggs. If I collect a queen, I prevent the founding of an
entire large colony of bumblebees. I did not want to do this, so
I avoided collecting