Native bees (solitary bees) are extremely important to the southern New Mexico and west Texas area.

Honey bees are the most recognizable members of the bee lineage. But they’re imports, introduced by European settlers in the 17th century. Massing in colonies 60,000 strong, European honey bees have adapted, and they flourish in our area.

Bashira Chowdhury, a pollination ecologist with the Bee Biodiversity Initiative at Auburn University, “Pollination preservation in the American Southwest is a little different than in other parts of the country,” Chowdhury said. “The Chihuahuan Desert – southern New Mexico forms a good chunk of its western stretch – is the heart of bee diversity in North America. Native Bees are most diverse in desert regions, not in greener parts of the country. In fact, areas we tend to associate with bees, places like the Intermountain West and the northern parts of the U.S., have lower bee diversity than the American Southwest.”

“Given this biological diversity, we also find a strong cultural heritage between people and their pollinators,” she said. “The American Southwest, and the Chihuahuan Desert region in particular, has a rich agro-biodiversity. This is where squashes, beans, chiles and many of our medicinal plants come from. Beyond these plants, original dye and fiber crops come from this region, and all this crop diversity is largely due to how indigenous people worked with their native pollinators to produce crop varieties. The most famous example comes from indigenous people working with their squash bees to create the different varieties of squashes we know today, everything from pumpkins to acorns.”

Tessa R. Grasswitz, New Mexico State University, Agricultural Science Center and David R. Dreesen, Natural Resources Conservation Service Plant Materials Center have published an excellent publication on Native Bees in New Mexico.  Please click below to view

The Southwest and Mexico are one of the world’s great historic centers of agriculture. Critical crops originated here – including squash. That depended on a desert native – the squash bee.

“Our acorns, our butternuts, our pumpkins, our crooknecks – everything came from here,” she said, “and from the bee that came from here, which is important. We actually cultivated not only the squashes, but the bee, so we cultivated an ecological interaction over time, and this is indigenous groups.”