Two drawers of pinned bees are quietly rewriting how the public sees pollinators

Deep in Auburn University’s Bee Center, two Cornell-style drawers hold a quiet revolution in public science education. Inside them sit hundreds of pinned insects—bees, wasps, flies, and beetles—arranged with written statements that explain their biology, behavior, and natural history. These drawers form the outreach collection of the Auburn University Native Bee Lab, and according to a new paper published in Natural History Collections and Museomics, they have become the lab’s single most powerful tool for teaching the public what bees really are. The collection has reached thousands of Alabamans since 2022, from elementary school students peering into microscopes to farmers and beekeepers learning how to transform their land into pollinator habitat. What makes the story remarkable is how much misconception a single drawer of dead insects can dismantle.

Alabama is the fourth most biodiverse state in the United States for flora and fauna, yet its native bee fauna remains poorly documented. Researchers estimate the state contains roughly 500 native bee species, comparable to neighboring Georgia, but the exact number is uncertain because Alabama lacks a comprehensive, long-term monitoring program. Among these species are bees of extraordinary anatomical, social, and behavioral variety—solitary ground-nesters, cavity-dwellers, kleptoparasites, and primitively eusocial bumble bees. The stakes are high: three Alabama bee species are being or have been evaluated for listing under the Endangered Species Act, including the American Bumble Bee, the Southern Plains Bumble Bee, and the Gulf Coast Solitary Bee. The Variable Cuckoo Bumble Bee, listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List, has also been recorded in the state, though it is considered incredibly rare. Established in 2018, the Auburn University Native Bee Lab was created to fill this research gap, with a mission to understand and promote native bees and other pollinators through research, instruction, and outreach.

The lab’s outreach program is extensive and structured around three event types: exhibition booth events, educational seminars, and interactive demonstrations. Between 2022 and 2025, events using the outreach collection reached 1,070 K–12 students across 19 events, 2,995 college students and employees across 20 events, and 1,096 community organization members across 19 events—a total of 5,161 people. At booth events, the lab displays active and passive bee traps such as blue vane traps, pan traps, and aerial nets to show how pollinators are collected for research, alongside recommended literature and wildflower seeds with planting instructions. But the Cornell drawers are the essential materials. Visitors can view the array of specimens the lab has collected, with information highlighting the ecology, behavior, and natural history of each species or group. Though many visitors see bees daily, they rarely have the opportunity to see a wide array of bees up close, and a personal encounter with pinned specimens helps the public build a stronger connection to these small but paramount insects.

Entomology collections themselves are repositories of preserved specimens and associated data that serve biodiversity monitoring, conservation, education, and scientific research. Specimen records allow scientists to track historical and current species distributions—especially important for documenting threatened or endangered species—and physical specimens can be used for genetic analysis, offering insights into evolutionary relationships and population genetics. Collection data are often shared among researchers, conservationists, government agencies, and the public, and accessible data supports accurate taxonomic identification, which underpins much ecological and conservation research. The Auburn outreach collection is a curated subset of the lab’s larger research collection, deliberately restricted to common species—those encountered often within a given area—because rare species are limited in number within the whole research collection. Specimens were donated by entomologists Anthony Abbate, Josh Campbell, and Sam Droege, obtained from personal collections of lab personnel, from bycatch of previous research projects, and from a published study examining the effects of herbicide usage along rights-of-way on native pollinators. All bees, wasps, flies, and beetles were identified using taxonomic keys.

The first drawer, the native pollinator drawer, contains a diverse variety of bees as well as wasps, flies, and beetles, organized by specific topics and categories with written statements accompanying each grouping. The second, the insect order drawer, showcases the diversity of insect orders, each labeled, to introduce insect diversity to the public and display species they may encounter in everyday life. This second drawer serves a psychological purpose too: a fair amount of the public is apprehensive about insects, and some suffer from entomophobia. By providing a safe and controlled way for people to interact with insects through pinned specimens, the display helps visitors develop a sense of appreciation and curiosity. During events, the public often comments on the lethal collection of specimens, and the lab openly discusses its careful and ethical approach. Many bee species cannot be reliably identified in the field and require microscopic examination and taxonomic keys to distinguish subtle morphological features, making specimen collection essential for accurate identification. The lab avoids over-sampling bee communities to minimize impact on local populations.

The drawer’s topics are engineered to confront the most stubborn misconceptions head-on. Perhaps the biggest: that all bees nest in hives. In reality, approximately 30 percent of native bees nest in cavities while the other 70 percent create nests underground. A section of the drawer is dedicated to cavity-nesting and ground-nesting species, with photos of both nest types displayed alongside specimens. Leafcutter bees and mason bees—genera often seen visiting bee hotels—represent cavity-nesters that use pithy or hollow-stemmed plants, partitioning their nests with leaves, mud, and resin. Carpenter bee specimens show bees that excavate nests in human-made structures, while the Pure Golden Green Sweat Bee represents bees that nest in dead wood, often within abandoned insect burrows. The lab also highlights more exotic nesting strategies—abandoned rodent burrows, woody debris, even snail shells. Nesting behavior education is a perfect precursor for discussing bee life cycles: audiences are typically surprised to learn that bees spend the vast majority of their lives in the larval stage, averaging only three to six weeks as adults.

Sexual dimorphism gets its own section, with three species—a representative male and female of each—demonstrating how anatomical differences between sexes can be so apparent that a male and female of the same species could be mistaken for two different species. The stinger discussion is central: only female bees can sting, because the stinger is an evolved ovipositor. The lab explains that honey bees have barbed stingers while native bees have smooth stingers lacking ridges or barbs—demolishing the belief that bees lose their stingers. Outside the United States, stingless bees of the tribe Meliponini have non-functional stingers, though they are not native to the country. Another anatomical difference: female bees typically have dense scopal hairs used to carry pollen, while bumble bees and honey bees have specialized pollen baskets called corbiculae on their hind legs. Males, which do not gather pollen for nest provisioning, lack both. The drawer also confronts the myth that all bees are hairy—different species use various pollen-collecting methods, and the presence, location, and density of scopal hairs varies across species. Bees in the genus Hylaeus, for example, store pollen internally.

Bumble bees receive special treatment because the public often believes there is a singular bumble bee species, when Alabama likely hosts 20. Six species are represented in the drawer, including the Southern Plains Bumble Bee. Beside the pinned specimens, statements explain buzz pollination—sonication—by which bumble bees pollinate crops that benefit from the technique, and note that bumble bees pollinate during inclement weather, something honey bees do not endure with ease. All non-parasitic bumble bee species exhibit primitive eusociality: cooperative brood care, overlapping generations, and a caste system dividing labor between reproductive and non-reproductive females. Unlike honey bee colonies, which are perennial and can contain thousands of individuals, bumble bee colonies are annual, reaching a maximum of roughly 400 individuals depending on species. A queen and worker Common Eastern Bumble Bee demonstrate the size difference. But the genus has an exception: the Lemon Cuckoo Bumble Bee, a kleptoparasitic social parasite that invades colonies of other bumble bee species and manipulates workers to raise its offspring. Its females lack corbiculae, observed in primitively eusocial bumble bee females.

Kleptoparasitism itself is one of the drawer’s most captivating topics. An estimated 13 percent of the roughly 20,000 bee species worldwide are kleptoparasites, and Alabama likely hosts up to 120 kleptoparasitic species. These bees are typically less hairy, lack scopal hairs and corbiculae, and consequently have a more wasp-like appearance. A kleptoparasitic female searches for the nest of a pollinating female; when the host leaves, the parasite enters and lays her egg inside a provisioned cell, where either she or her young eliminates the developing host egg or larva. Far from being bad bees, kleptoparasites help regulate other bee species’ populations and serve as indicator taxa for overall bee community health—their presence indicates a more complex and diverse bee community, since they cannot exist without their hosts. The drawer displays Lemon Cuckoo Bumble Bees and cuckoo bees of the genus Triepeolus to educate the public about this unique subset of native bees and show how many bees appear more wasp-like. The lab stresses that bees evolved from wasps, share many evolutionary traits, and that both groups provide pollination services with ecological and intrinsic value—dismantling the good-insect, bad-insect dichotomy.

The drawer also introduces introduced and invasive species, managed native bees, and Batesian mimics. The public is often surprised to learn the European Honey Bee was introduced to the United States in 1622 by European settlers for honey production. The Giant Resin Bee, both introduced and invasive, has been known to evict carpenter bees from their nesting cavities. The Dilemma Orchid Bee, introduced in Florida from Central and South America, showcases eye-catching characteristics—enlarged hind tibiae of males, heart-shaped corbiculae of females, and incredibly long tongues two-thirds the length of their bodies—illustrating how coevolution of bees and angiosperms has produced specialized plant-pollinator interactions. Managed native species like the Common Eastern Bumble Bee and the Orchard Mason Bee demonstrate that crop pollination relies on more than honey bees. Fly families Syrphidae and Bombyliidae, and scarab beetles of the genus Trigonopeltastes, exhibit Batesian mimicry with bee-like coloration and hairs, educating the public on anatomical differences between flies, beetles, bees, and wasps. The lab has also contributed outreach articles to the ACES Beekeeping Newsletter and Bee Culture Magazine, expanding its reach. The lab recognizes the importance of outreach and will continue to grow its program and collection to reach broader audiences and promote native pollinator conservation efforts.

Subject of Research: Promoting native bee conservation through outreach: the Auburn University Native Bee Lab outreach collection

Article Title: Promoting native bee conservation through outreach: the Auburn University Native Bee Lab outreach collection

Article References: Cates, J. A. L., & Abbate, A. P. (2025). Promoting native bee conservation through outreach: the Auburn University Native Bee Lab outreach collection. Natural History Collections and Museomics, 2, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.3897/nhcm.2.156799

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/nhcm.2.156799

Keywords: Promoting, native, conservation, outreach, Auburn, University, collection, scientific research