Honey Odyssey

Andrenidae

Perdita minima

Cockerell, 1923

Perdita minima is a tiny solitary desert bee, slightly less than 2 mm long, and is reported as the smallest bee species in the Americas. It lives in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, nests in sandy soil, and collects pollen from spurges (Euphorbia), such as whitemargin sandmat.

Perdita minima,
Photo: KRHick, CC BY-SA 4.0

What we know

How to recognise it

  • This bee is slightly less than two millimetres long.

    Confirmed fact[1]

  • A recent checklist of Baja California bees describes it as the smallest bee species in the Americas.

    Confirmed fact[2]

Where it lives

  • It is widely distributed in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States.

    Confirmed fact[2]

  • On the Baja California Peninsula it has been reported from coastal succulent scrub, the Magdalena Plains and the Gulf Coast.

    Observation[2]

Life cycle and colony

  • It is a solitary bee, so unlike honey bees it does not live in colonies.

    Confirmed fact[1]

Nest

  • It builds a tiny nest in sandy desert soil.

    Confirmed fact[1]

Flowers and food

  • It is a pollen specialist on Euphorbia, the spurge genus.

    Confirmed fact[2]

  • It feeds on the nectar and pollen of wildflowers in the spurge family.

    Confirmed fact[1]

  • Whitemargin sandmat, a small desert spurge, is one of the wildflowers it frequently visits.

    Confirmed fact[1]

Behaviour

  • Despite its size, its hairy legs can be packed with very large loads of pollen.

    Confirmed fact[1]

Bees and people

  • People looking for this bee usually watch for its passing shadow on the ground rather than the bee itself.

    Confirmed fact[1]

  • The type specimen, a female, was collected in Tempe, Arizona, on 30 July 1917.

    Observation[2]

Where it has been recorded

Each hexagon contains at least one record of Perdita minima shared with GBIF: museum specimens, surveys and photographs.

1,070 records

  1. United States827
  2. Mexico237

GBIF.org occurrence data for taxon key 1356055, retrieved 2026-10-19. Observation[3]

Records show where the bee has been found and reported, not its full range or its abundance. Isolated points far from the main cluster can be misidentifications, captive or imported bees, or genuine rare finds.

More from this part of the bee family tree

Andrena fulva, Tawny mining bee
Andrena fulvaTawny mining beeAndrenidae
Apis cerana, Asian honey bee
Apis ceranaAsian honey beeApidae
Apis dorsata, Giant honey bee
Apis dorsataGiant honey beeApidae
Apis florea, Dwarf honey bee
Apis floreaDwarf honey beeApidae

Sources

  1. Buchmann, S. (The Bee Works). Perdita minima. Pollinator of the Month, Celebrating Wildflowers. USDA Forest Service (undated). Link
  2. De Pedro, D., Ceccarelli, F. S., Sagot, P., López-Reyes, E., Mullins, J. L., Mérida-Rivas, J. A., Falcon-Brindis, A., Griswold, T., Ascher, J. S., Gardner, J., Ayala, R., Vides-Borrell, E. & Vandame, R. (2024). Revealing the Baja California Peninsula's hidden treasures: an annotated checklist of the native bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Anthophila). Zootaxa 5522(1) (species treatment on p. 117). doi:10.11646/zootaxa.5522.1.1. Treatment for Perdita (Perditella) minima as deposited by Plazi on Zenodo. Link
  3. GBIF.org (2026). Occurrence search and density maps for Perdita minima, taxon key 1356055. Link

Last checked: 20 October 2026. Every statement on this page was compared with the source it cites. Spotted an error? Report it.