The more than 400 species of wild bees in the northeast can be classified according to six taxonomic families. Although it may seem intuitive to start by identifying your bee to family, this can actually pose more problems than it solves. Some closely related genera have evolved to look incredibly different in the field, meaning knowing that your bee belongs to a particular family does not get you any closer to nailing the species-level identification. Other times, it’s rather useful to know which genera are closely related to one another, so we provide them here.
