Forget honey bees. This LA artist finds meaning chasing California native bees
LOS ANGELES -- Krystle Hickman is the epitome of single-minded. She's polite and friendly with the reporter and photographer trailing her through the sand and rocks of the Acton Wash Wildlife Sanctuary south of Palmdale, but her distraction is apparent. There's clearly something else buzzing in the back of her mind.
Bees. But not the European-immigrant honey bees that live in hives and pollinate our crops. There are plenty of those hogging the fading rabbit bush blooms growing in thick gold clusters throughout this wash.
No, Hickman is searching for a special California native bee, Triepeolus verbesinae, a parasitic wasp-shaped "cuckoo" bee, so named because its behavior is similar to cuckoo birds, which lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. Cuckoo bees go one better: The female Triepeolus lay their eggs in the nests of other bees so their young can feast on the pollen left by the host mother, as well as the eggs or larvae in the hosts' nests.
She seems amused and slightly puzzled when I recoil at that description.
Did you know, she said with a kind of wonder, that Triepeolus sleep by clenching their tiny jaws around the stem of a plant, so they won't fall off? Or that California is a hot spot for native bees? Of the 4,000 or so species in the United States, she said, more than 1,600 reside within the state's borders.
Most people don't even realize that native bees are different from honey bees, which pollinate most of our crops. Native bees are actually considered more efficient pollinators, she said, and some farmers in California are trying to lure them
