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This Bee Lives Between a Rock and a Hard Place

A female Pueblo bee
Side shot of an adult female A. pueblo bee. Scale bar below is at one-half millimeter.

Have you ever paid a visit to the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Park in Utah? If so, you may be intrigued  to learn about a fuzzy gray bee that carves its nest into chunks of sandstone!

One day several years ago, Utah State University graduate student Michael Orr was working in the park when he spied some bees's nests made in a column of sandstone rock. With a sweep net in hand, Michael scaled a sandstone rock cliff to capture some specimens of the bees and then consulted with ARS scientist Terry Griswold to devise a plan to learn more about the about the strange but tenacious bee. Find out what he discovered.