Ground Bees

Bee Invasion

When days grew warmer in late March I began noticing little mounds of dirt resembling ant nests on bare patches of ground around my new house. Each small pile had a 6 mm hole in its center. Before long these nests were multiplying at an alarming rate, not only on bare ground, but also in my sod lawn, and even in pine bark mulch in front of my house. The holes were burrows dug by ground bees. Soon these bees were buzzing around everywhere. Clouds of them hovered and randomly flew back and forth near the nests. The pictures below show just one group of nests on one patch of bare ground next to my house. There were many, many more nests in other places around my house.

Fortunately, these bees were not very aggressive. When I mowed my lawn and walked directly into a bee cloud, they seemed to avoid me instead of bouncing off my body, or stinging. The bees, apparently, only nest like this for a month or so and then go away. (Where do they go?) By late May they had disappeared leaving only some ruined mounds behind.