This guide is written and maintained by Nick Dorian and Max McCarthy. It is free to use.

Nick Dorian is a Ph.D. candidate at Tufts University where he studies the population ecology of cellophane bees. He is also a passionate science educator and, in 2019, he co-founded Tufts Pollinator Initiative to engage local communities in urban pollinator conservation. When he’s not watching bees, Nick can be found in the garden, on a long run, or in the kitchen baking bread.

Max McCarthy is a Ph.D. student at Rutgers University, where he studies populations of the rare Parnassia Mining Bee and the pollination ecology of their host plant, Parnassia.

Credits

Range maps and phenology bar charts were created using Program R v. 4.1.2 using the ggplot2 package. Occurrence data were accessed through SCAN in January 2023.

If you use this guide to design a research study, please 1) always verify your identifications with voucher specimens and 2) cite this website to build interest in our work. Please do not use our guide to identify entire communities of bees.

All photographs were taken by Nick Dorian or Max McCarthy unless otherwise specified. You are free to use photographs for personal and educational purposes, but please do so with attribution.