It started with one woman's frustration and a unanimous city council vote in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2012. Fourteen years later, more than 400 American towns and college campuses have made formal commitments to become better habitat for native bees.
This National Pollinator Week, we explore what the Bee City USA movement actually does, why the science of solitary bee foraging ranges makes urban habitat networks so critical, and what happens when a city decides to see itself as a landscape instead of just a skyline.
References:
Bee City USA history and program structure
- Xerces Society: "Bee City USA: Galvanizing Communities to Reverse Pollinator Decline" — xerces.org/blog/bee-city-usa-wings
- Xerces Society: "Phyllis Stiles of Asheville, NC: The Buzz Behind Bee City USA" — xerces.org/news (May 2024)
- Bee City Asheville: beecityasheville.org/about
- Bee City USA: beecityusa.org/about
Solitary bee foraging ranges
- Gathmann, A. & Tscharntke, T. (2002). Foraging ranges of solitary bees. Journal of Animal Ecology, 71, 757–764.
- Zurbuchen, A. et al. (2010). Maximum foraging ranges in solitary bees. Biological Conservation, 143(3), 669–676. DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2009.12.003
- Hofmann, M.M. et al. (2020). Foraging distances in six species of solitary bees. Journal of Hymenoptera Research, 77, 105–117.
Urban bee diversity and connectivity
- Lundquist, M.J. et al. (2025). Bug roads: Modeling green space connectivity in NYC. Ecological Applications, 35(7), e70128. DOI: 10.1002/eap.70128
- Frantzeskaki, N. et al. (2024). Bees in the city: scoping review. Ambio, 53(9), 1281–1295. DOI: 10.1007/s13280-024-02028-1
National Pollinator Week
- Pollinator Partnership: pollinator.org/pollinator-week
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[00:00:03] Welcome back to Secret Pollinators. It's National Pollinator Week, and I want to tell you about something that started in a City Council chamber in Asheville, North Carolina on June 26, 2012.
[00:00:18] A woman named Phyllis Stiles walked in, no funding, no organization, just frustration and a steering committee of beekeepers, and persuaded the City Council to vote unanimously on a resolution.
[00:00:36] Asheville would become the first Bee City USA, and what happened next is a story about how cities can become something bees actually need, and why it matters for the 3,600 wild bee species that call this country home.
[00:00:53] The problem with cities. Here's the thing about cities from a native bee perspective. They're a nightmare. Not because of noise or traffic, but because of distance. Solitary native bees like, you know, mason bees, swept bees, leafcutter bees, mining bees, they live at a completely different scale than we do.
[00:01:17] Most small solitary females don't forage farther than 150 to 300 meters from their nest. Not kilometers, meters. So half a city block is often the entire foraging world for a small native bee. And that means for a native bee to survive in a city, food and nesting habitat have to be close, continuous, and connected.
[00:01:43] A single patch of native flowers surrounded by pavement isn't enough, and it won't work. The patch needs neighbors. A park, a garden, a cemetery, a sidewalk tree pit. These only work as a network. Because isolated, they serve almost no one. And that's exactly what most American cities have been. Islands of greed and a sea of pavement.
[00:02:10] They're beautiful to us, but nearly inaccessible to all the bees that need them most. And Phyllis Stiles had a word for why native bees have it harder than anyone else. They have no beekeepers. No one managing them, monitoring them, or going out in the morning to make sure they're okay. They live and die in the gaps between what we've decided to build.
[00:02:37] And she wanted to change that. What a bee city actually does. To become a Bee City USA affiliate, a city commits to four things. Create and maintain pollinator habitat. Provide nesting sites. Reduce pesticide use. And hold at least one community outreach event a year. Then report annually to keep certification.
[00:03:06] I mean, that's not really a lot. When those commitments went into effect in Asheville, something unexpected happened. Individuals, churches, businesses, nonprofits, everybody wanted in. A local brewery transformed a brownfield into pollinator habitat. Native plantings went into the university campus, into parks, into front yards.
[00:03:30] The city stopped thinking about itself as a cityscape and started thinking about itself as a landscape. Nesting habitat turned out to be just as important as flowers. 75% of native bees in North America nest in the ground. In a bare or sparsely vegetated soil area.
[00:03:54] A beautifully maintained and manicured city with perfect lawn coverage is, for most native bees, a place with nowhere to live. So Bee City commitments push communities to see a patch of bare ground not as neglected, but as real estate. Two years of silence. After Asheville voted in 2012, Phyllis Stiles waited. She gave presentations.
[00:04:24] She spread the word. And she waited for a second city to apply. Two years passed. No second city. Then, in September 2014, a beekeeper named Dolly Warden in the small town of Talent, Oregon, all the way across the country, persuaded her city to join. A third followed, then a fourth, then a fifth.
[00:04:49] So one person's stubbornness held the door open long enough for someone else to walk through it. And by the time the Zero-Sea Society took over the program in 2018, it had grown beyond what Stiles could manage alone. And today, more than 400 cities, towns, and college campuses across 48 states are Bee City or Bee Campus USA affiliates. From Seattle to Albuquerque to Ypsilanti, Michigan.
[00:05:18] All bound by the same four commitments. It's not a trend. It's a network. And networks are exactly what native bees need. What the science shows. Here's what surprised researchers when they started actually surveying bees in well-connected urban green spaces. Cities can support greater bee diversity than agricultural land.
[00:05:46] A monoculture farm, which is like mile after mile of a single crop, you know, wheat or corn. Well, they offer bees almost nothing outside of bloom season. A city, for all its concrete, often having diverse plantings, year-round bloom sequences, and pockets of undisturbed ground. One urban garden in Europe documented 106 wild bee species in a single site.
[00:06:15] And research in New York City found that even in one of the most built-up environments on Earth, green spaces function as stepping stones for native bees. As long as they're close enough to reach. The critical variable isn't whether a place is urban. It's whether its green spaces are connected. So let's think about that for a minute, because it's pretty important and it's pretty easy to do.
[00:06:45] This week. The organization that runs the National Pollinator Week, which is June 22nd through June 28th, is the Pollinator Partnership. They created it. They manage it. And they're also the organization behind the Certified Pollinator Steward credential I hold. So this week is a little personal for me. And what I keep coming back to is that the Bee City USA story is fundamentally about attention.
[00:07:16] Deciding to notice what is already there. The sweat bee investigating a crack in the sidewalk. The miney bee checking out a patch of bare ground in a parking lot corner. The native wildflower that's self-seeded in a space that no one thought to plant. Cities aren't the enemies of native bees. They can be exactly what native bees need when people living in them decide to pay attention.
[00:07:44] 400 communities have decided to do that. And your community could be one of them. So enjoy National Pollinator Week and please help spread the word. It's really important. And I appreciate you listening to this episode and supporting and advocating for native bees. So until next time, keep watching those native bees because you know they're probably watching you back. Music Music