At Risk: Blue Calamintha Bee
Until this spring, the "ultra-rare" blue calamintha bee, scientific name Osmia calaminthae, was known only to exist in central Florida and hadn’t been seen at all since 2016.
The bee’s primary home, Lake Wales Ridge, is a 150-mile-long sandy spine running down the center of the state, the remnant of ancient islands in Florida’s distant past.
The region harbors plant and animal species found nowhere else, but ranks among the nation’s fastest-disappearing ecosystems, with pockets of natural habitat surrounded by citrus groves and suburban neighborhoods.
Florida Museum photo by Jaret Daniels
The bee’s common name comes from its main host plant Ashe’s calamint, Calamintha ashei, itself a threatened species in the state. False rosemary, Conradina brevifolia, is even rarer, listed as endangered at both state and federal levels. Ashe’s Calamint is a woody mint found in the sand pine and scrub habitat of the Florida central highlands, as well as two counties in southeastern Georgia
It gathers pollen by bobbing its head side to side to collect it on its facial hairs.
All bees in the Osmia genus, which includes the Blue Calamintha Bee, are commonly referred to as mason bees because they cap their nests with mud.
Ashe’s calamint
Researchers learned the blue calamintha bee visits false rosemary earlier in the year, before Ashe’s calamint is in bloom, leading to concerns about food availability if warming temperatures decouple the timing of the plant’s blossoming from the bee’s emergence in February.
The blue calamintha bee’s underground nesting habits came as a surprise to the researchers, who expected it to use hollow stems or holes in dead trees.
Florida Museum photo by Clint Gibson
Why is it at Risk?
The primary threat facing the Blue Calamintha Bee is the destruction and modification of its habitat in southern Lake Wales Ridge, Highlands County, Florida, the area to which the Bee is endemic.
The Bee is currently only known from four sites in an area representing less than sixteen square miles. These four sites all occur on scattered undeveloped lots in a platted subdivision called Placid Lakes.
There are only sixty to eighty occurrences of Ashe’s Calamint in the Florida central highlands and southeastern Georgia, and the primary threat to this plant species is habitat destruction through commercial and residential development and conversion of land to citrus groves.
Herbicides from nearby agricultural operations may also pose a threat to Ashe’s Calamint, Florida scrub, and, consequently, also to the Blue Calamintha Bee. When broad-spectrum herbicides are applied to control weeds on agricultural lands, they indiscriminately remove floral resources, host plants, and nesting habitat.
