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Honeybees have been dying in record numbers in the U.S. for at least the past two years. Experts attribute the mass deaths to a catchall condition known as colony collapse disorder (CCD), although both a cure and the culprit remain elusive. Despite as much as a 35 percent loss of bees per year, we remain almost entirely dependent on what until recently was a self-renewing annual population of billions of honeybees to pollinate over 130 kinds of fruit and nut crops.

“We can’t rely on the honeybee forever,” says Blair Sampson, an entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). That’s a problem, given that entomologists have yet to come up with a viable alternative. But researchers report that another bee known as the blue orchard, or Osmia lignaria, holds out promise of filling in the void.

The blue orchard bee, also known as the orchard mason bee, is one of 3,000 bee species native to the U.S. and is currently the subject of intensive study by the USDA’s Pollinating Insect Biology, Management and Systematics Research Unit at Utah State University in Logan.

James Cane, an entomologist at the Logan bee lab, has been working for 10 years to increase the availability of these bees and he says there are now a million blue orchards pollinating crops in California.

The reason these bees are considered the best potential honeybee stand-ins, Cane says, is that unlike some specialist native species, blue orchard bees, like honeybees, can pollinate a variety of crops-including almonds, peaches, plums, cherries, apples and others.

In just about every other respect, however, these bees are totally unlike their European brethren. For one, they tend to live alone. In the wild, rather than hives, they inhabit boreholes drilled by beetles into the trunks and branches of dead trees. When cultivated, they will happily occupy holes drilled into lumber or even Styrofoam blocks.