Small Bees

The Perdita are the most diverse of North American bees. They’re also known as “fairy bees” because they can be as small as 2mm long. There are over 600 species, most are in the dry southwest US and northern Mexico. Fewer than 30 species are found east of the Mississippi, however, and barely a handful are here in the mid-Atlantic and New England. I think this is one of them: tentatively identified on iNaturalist as Perdita swenki. There were a few of these around these scrubby dune asters at Fort Tilden.

And this looks like the Eight-spotted Fairy Bee/P. octomaculata, foraging on a planted goldenrod at Bush Terminal.

Foraging distances for solitary nesting bees have to been shown to correlate to body-size, so small bees like these, under 5mm long, are probably nesting fairly close by, perhaps within 10 meters of the flowers you see them on.

In 2020, the Journal of the Kansas Entomological Society published the first records of Perdita bequareti in Massachusetts, noting that they had already been seen in New York (in one case on Staten Island), bringing MA’s Perdita species count up to 5.