California's economic savior might be this annoying insect

May 12-On a Saturday morning in mid-April, driving into Joshua Tree National Park's Ryan Campground, the scenery was striking: Giant, rounded boulders. Scurrying lizards. Spiky cholla cactus, shrubby creosote and, of course, the park's namesake Joshua trees. But on the short walk from car to campsite, a more concerning life form came into view.

Bees. Hundreds of them.

They were swarming around a large blue water container that my campmates had left on a table when they departed for a hike. I kept my distance, and the bees were focused on the water. But seeing that many in one place - mere feet from where I was planning to sleep that night - was alarming. And it was only the bee-ginning.

As the weekend continued, I noticed multiple park signs with bee warnings and encountered hundreds of bees buzzing around the bathroom at the Keys View lookout. A Los Angeles couple camped nearby told me that as soon as they arrived at the campground and opened their car doors, bees entered their vehicle. They were trying to put sunscreen on, Kian Fakhri recalled, when the bees got interested in his travel partner, Delphi Vendryes.

"She would try to get away, and they would follow her," Fakhri said. "It was a little uncomfortable."

After the camping trip, I started calling around to find out more about the park's bee problem, and I learned from a park spokesperson that swarms of honeybees in Joshua Tree are a common sight during the spring and summer months. Park visitors are oftentimes aware of the issue, but in speaking with area bee experts, I found out something few people know about: The same bees that occasionally bother humans in Joshua Tree might also be part of a solution to the precipitous decline of honeybees nationwide.

"Last year, the American beekeepers lost over 60% of their bees, so you're heading into pollination Armageddon," Boris Baer, a professor at the UC Riverside Center for Integrative Bee Research, told SFGATE. But the feral honeybees in Joshua Tree, which have escaped from farms and manage to survive in harsh desert conditions, give him hope.

"I think there is the potential that these bees, one day, could really save our butts," Baer said. "They could actually save millions of lives."

'Almost a perfect bee'

To understand why Baer thinks Joshua Tree honeybees are the bee's knees, it helps to know a little about where they came from.

Honeybees aren't native to the Americas. European settlers brought them here in the 17th century to produce honey and beeswax and pollinate crops, and that subspecies soon spread across the U.S., sometimes escaping and forming feral colonies that competed with native pollinators (such as bumble bees) for nectar.

These European honeybees are relatively docile, but they don't fare well in tropical climates. So in 1956, Brazil imported African honeybees, a different subspecies that thrives in heat and humidity, to crossbreed them with local populations. In 1957, some of the African queens escaped from an experimental apiary near Sao Paulo, spreading quickly across the Americas and forming hybrid populations with feral and commercial European honeybees.

This "Africanized" subspecies became known for chasing, stinging and, on very rare occasions, killing people, and their depiction in 1970s Hollywood horror films as "killer bees" didn't help their reputation.

Africanized hybrid bees were first detected in California in 1994, and they remain present in the state. But over time, using management practices such as selective breeding to "bring the spiciness of the bees down," their African ancestry has been reduced to about 30%, according to Baer.

Not only are many of the hybrid honeybees of Joshua Tree and the surrounding desert less defensive than their African ancestors, Baer explained, but by necessity, they've become much better equipped than their European ancestors to survive harsh conditions.

In the desert, they can travel up to 7 miles to find nectar and water, and they proceed to calculate the distance and direction of the resources in relation to the hive using the polarization of the sun. Then they communicate the locations to other bees through a dance. If the calculations and dance aren't extremely accurate, the other bees won't find the resources and the hive may starve or overheat.

So that's the reason you'll find bees swarming around even small amounts of water in the park. After receiving instructions from "scout bees," hundreds or even thousands of other bees travel miles to find that water, which they'll ingest and store in a special stomach to bring back to the hive. There, it will be used to cool hot air in much the same way a swamp cooler does, powered by "venting bees" that create a draft at the hive entrance with their wings.

Because there is so little water in the desert, and flower blooms are so short-lived, any disturbances in the activities of the honeybees can threaten their survival. "They have a hard time eking out a living," said Jon Vesely, a beekeeper who also does bee rescue, relocation and community outreach through his business, bee4thesolution. "They don't produce a lot of recoverable honey. It's basically hand-to-mouth."

By contrast, the average farm honeybee, also known as a "managed bee" is pretty helpless, Vesely explained. They're genetically modified to be hardworking and gentle, but they're not very smart or robust, particularly after being transported around the country, loaded up with antibiotics and fed one monoculture diet after the next, he said. Also, they get Varroa mites, tiny parasites that feed on bees and transmit viruses. "It's as if you had 16 basketballs stuck to your body and you're trying to work," Vesely said.

The feral hybrid bees in Joshua Tree, which Baer and Vesely referred to as "California bees," have a natural resistance to those mites. They also have stronger respiratory systems, Vesely said, and can groom and clean each other. For all these reasons, Baer believes these bees will someday be crucial to sustaining the multibillion-dollar pollination industry and likely become the widespread pollinators of more than 80 crops across the United States.

"First California had gold, then oil, then Silicon Valley, and now they have almost a perfect bee," Baer said.

How to beehave

Once informed of the potential importance of Joshua Tree National Park's feral honeybees, it's natural to wonder: How should humans act around them? Firstly, it's important to remain calm in the presence of bees, said national park spokesperson Ana Beatriz Cholo.

"If bees are nearby or flying around you, do not flail or swat at them. They are usually not trying to sting and may simply be attracted to sweat, food, or water," she wrote in an email to SFGATE. "Swatting can agitate or crush bees, causing them to sting. Slow waving motions are okay to discourage them from landing on you."

Cholo also advised that visitors "keep car windows rolled up, use caution when exiting vehicles, keep food and drinks sealed in vehicles or packs, and avoid hives or swarms." Although the park does not keep statistics on how many people are stung, it does not appear to be very many. There are definitely a few known incidents, however.

In 2024, one man stepped directly onto a beehive at the Keys View area and got stung three times. This makes sense, Baer said, because bees are sensitive to vibrations and can be very defensive of their hives. Also, once a person is stung, the barb releases a pheromone and "other bees realize, OK, somebody put you down as an enemy of the state," Baer said.

He recommends scraping out the stinger as soon as possible to decrease the likelihood of being stung multiple times and to stop it from releasing poison into the body. Unfortunately, back in 2000, one group of Joshua Tree hikers found themselves in a nightmare scenario, with one man getting stung over 100 times and breaking his leg, and three other men getting stung upward of 25 times each.

The incident took place in the northwest region of the park, which was subsequently closed, according to a Los Angeles Times article. More recently, in August 2024, park officials closed the Cottonwood visitor center, campground restrooms and parking area due to "increased bee activity," and in 2020, both the Cottonwood and Jumbo Rocks areas were closed after bees began swarming vehicles.

Although the park does not track statistics on how many people are stung in the park, Cholo said public safety is the priority. "When bee activity creates a public safety concern, the park evaluates the situation and responds as appropriate using trained personnel or qualified specialists," she wrote.

'The New Bee Deal'

For Baer, the worst thing that could possibly happen - both for the bees and for the humans - is that a person dies from a bee sting. To prevent that, he thinks advancements in artificial insemination are needed to ensure that more docile bees are rebred and that queens aren't mating with "little terrorists." He'd like to see the same kind of effort put toward breeding "California bees" for crop pollination.

It would need to be a communal project involving researchers, educators and beekeepers - "a New Bee Deal," he likes to call it. It's been done in Europe and Australia, he said, where breeding programs started as collaborations between researchers and beekeepers and resulted in highly successful commercialized breeding lines.

An important thing to keep in mind, though, is that the bees have their own personalities and cultures, and the traits that make them successful as bees might not perfectly align with the way humans would like them to act. But certainly there's a compromise that can be reached?

"We have to come halfway towards the animal," he said, "and let it be bee."

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This story was originally published May 12, 2026 at 10:41 AM.