It’s hard not to be alarmed when hundreds of ground bees suddenly pop up out of their holes and start to fly around your garden in late spring. But an article in Modern Farmer by Alison Gillespie says we should welcome these insects, not try to kill them.

Ground bees, Gillespie says, are excellent pollinators and they rarely sting. They don’t make honey, they are solitary — one bee lays eggs and cares for them in her own ground nest — and they are plentiful, making up “more than 70 percent of the 4,000-plus bee species native to North America.”

Yellow jackets also make their nests in the ground, but they can sting you if disturbed. They enter their nests through one large hole, Gillespie writes, while ground bees enter and exit from tiny openings that “look more like ant hills or teeny chimneys” — a good way to decide if you’re looking at the home of wasps or of ground bees.

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