Bee City USA
The City of Columbia has officially become a Bee City USA, a national program that promotes pollinator-friendly practices, making it the fifth and largest Bee City in South Carolina. The City unanimously approved the designation on August 5, 2025, following a presentation to the Health, Social and Environmental Affairs Committee.
Bee City USA, managed by the Xerces Society, encourages communities to create sustainable habitats for pollinators. By increasing pollinator-friendly plantings, promoting thoughtful land management and raising awareness, Bee City USA helps protect the pollinators that keep the City’s ecosystems thriving.
About Native Pollinators
Bees transfer pollen between flowers, enabling the incredible diversity of plants on our planet to fruit and reproduce. Pollinators are keystone species in essentially every ecosystem on Earth, facilitating the reproduction of over 85 percent of all flowering plants and over two-thirds of agricultural crops.
In addition to the domestic honey bee (Apis mellifera), a species brought to North America from Europe, there are more than 3,600 species of bees native to the United States. These wild bees are generally quite different than the domesticated honey bee–most of them live solitary lives, with a single female doing all of the work to build a nest, collect pollen and nectar, and lay eggs.
Unlike the honey bee, which nests aboveground and can be managed in wooden hives, more than two out of three wild bees live underground in nests that can be hard to spot from the surface! Some dig down and lay their eggs several feet below ground, while others make nests near the soil surface or in hollowed-out plant stems above ground. While bees are the most important pollinator, butterflies, moths, beetles, flies, wasps and hummingbirds also contribute to pollination.
Research has shown significant declines in native pollinator population sizes and ranges globally with up to 40 percent of pollinator species on Earth at risk of extinction in the coming years as a result a variety of environmental stressors including habitat loss and degradation, exposure to pesticides, diseases and pathogens, and climate change.
