Are the azaleas blooming? Then it's miner bee time of year! We saw a colony of miner bees humming with activity on the banks on Morgan Creek in Chapel Hill last weekend. In the NC piedmont, they emerge for only about 8 weeks each year, using around April and May. Despite the thousands of bees in this colony, miner bees are actually solitary. The set up their own nests, but clustered together. Think of miner bees as living in an apartment complex, rather than the group home of