@chaski Said
A thought... perhaps for perspective:
There are over 20,000 known bee species in the world. Of these 4,000 are native to the United States. Of these about 1600 are native to California. Julia and I have photographed about 48.
Comparatively, there are over 350,000 (some say over 400,000) known species of Coleoptera in the world.
That is beetles, not female rulers of ancient Egypt... and not rock-n-roll bands with odd names.
Coleoptera are by far the largest group of animals on planet earth, in terms of number of species, not in volume of members. That is, beetles makeup 25% of all known animal life-forms. Julia and I have photographed about 94.
(Side note: There is a story from 'back in the day', possibly apocryphal, where a somewhat famous naturalist suggested to a clergyman that God has an “inordinate fondness for beetles”. This is not a theological discussion, so let us address that idea at a later time.)
Perhaps more in contrast than comparison, there are only five great primates; Orangutan, gorilla, chimpanzee, bonobo and human.
Then there are the ants.
While there are only 12,000 species of ant, there are something like a million billion of the individual little 'hormigas' running around our planet.
The ant's number is dwarfed by bacteria, of which there are 30,000 species and something like five million trillion trillion individuals.
The number of bacteria is, not surprisingly, dwarfed by the quadrillion quadrillion viruses on Earth.
We could go on and on, but then we would be playing the game of statistics.
So, back to the bees... 70% nest in the ground. 90% are solitary bees, that is, they don't live in hives like honey bees.
The end.
For now.
😎