One of the new guides to identify Oregon native bees says it right up top: "bees are difficult to identify." There are lots of types of bees with lots of features that distinguish them, like whether or not they have spurs on their hind tibia (we are not making this up). That's why the new guides, called "keys" because they exist online instead of in print, provide many ways to figure out which of 600 native Oregon bees are in front of you.
The work of identifying a bee can be painstaking, so you can imagine the work that went into the identification keys. Jim Rivers, Associate Professor of Wildlife Ecology at the Oregon State University College of Forestry, and Josh Dunlap at the Oregon Department of Agriculture are among the people who did the work; they share details in a visit with the JX.
LINK: to the three keys, bee genera of the Pacific Northwest, and male and female species keys for the region’s bumblebees.