For many thousands of years before the familiar honeybee arrived, a different and varied set of bees has been hard at work in our local ecosystems. Now more than ever, our native pollinators need our help.

Bees invoke a broad spectrum of feelings: horror, fear, awe, adoration, or perhaps a combination of these. Yet, what if I told you most of these feelings are elicited by one species of bee out of roughly 400 different bee species in the Bay Area and about 1,600 in the state of California?