With around one third of human food crops dependent on pollination, the importance of bees for our survival is not to be underestimated. In recent years the world has watched as hundreds of different bee species have rapidly declined; some teetering dangerously close to extinction. Many of the questions of how and why this is happening have focused on the better-known and much-loved honey bee species, but in South East Queensland, a similar decline is taking place for our native bees. Small, shiny and black, our native bees are just as important as the exotic honey bees and yet remain relatively poorly understood. What happens to us if we lose these insects too? This is the story of the Sugarbag Bee.