You need a bit of patience to see a Small Carpenter Bee, genus Ceratina, well. I caught this little male, put him in a jar in the freezer, and then took photos as he woke up (yes, this is all quite rude). I let him go right where I found him and will forever cherish these little bees when I catch them zipping around our flowers. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Recently, I was out in my garden pulling up old pieces of bamboo used for fencing around some fragile native plants getting established. I was in the process of making a pile of them to burn, when I noticed several had their hollow ends delicately cemented in. Several years ago I would have thought almost nothing of this, but these little plugs brought me back to spring and the delights of plants and their pollinators. It was a gentle reminder that life is still going, even in the middle of winter.

Until I started learning about bees through the Washington Native Bee Society, joining the Washington Bee Atlas, and studying to become an Apprentice Master Melitologist through Oregon State University (half measures be damned), I probably wouldn’t have had much to say about what bees are doing during the winter. Or rather, I probably wouldn’t have even realized it was a question to ask. Most of us know that insects aren’t out in force during the winter and we generally understand they have to go somewhere during that period of time. But most of us don’t dwell on these ideas and certainly don’t consider them when we go about our annual gardening tasks.

The capped off ends of my bamboo poles were almost certainly created by a Mason Bee. These members of the genus Osmia are well known for their pollination services (they are much more efficient pollinators than European Honeybees), as well as their particular style of nest.

Finding a suitable hollow, be it a bamboo stick, a beetle hole in a log, or a cavity in the side of your concrete foundation, a female mason bee spends most of her adult life filling these spaces with chamber after chamber for her young. Various species use clay, gravel, soil, and even masticated plant material to brick in individual nest chambers for each egg, carefully provisioned with enough pollen and nectar to carry the occupant through to the point of emerging as an adult bee. And then, after a hopefully long, uneventful life of mating, masonry, egg laying, and pollen and nectar gathering – the female mason bee dies and leaves those provisioned young to figure it out.

A Mason Bee using a human provided nesting block. The caps on these holes match those of the bamboo in my yard. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Right now, there are bees laying in wait for spring and summer all over the Hill. There are probably ones in your home’s exterior walls, in the compact ground, in the plants that still haven’t pruned back.

A vast majority of those bees are univoltine, meaning they only produce one brood of young per year (or season). How they handle the time between egg laying and emerging as adults (remember, insect development is generally egg, larvae, pupa, adult) is as varied as their nesting structures and other life history specifics. But, a majority go through what’s called pre-pupal diapause. Once a female bee leaves her eggs with provisions, they are on their own to hatch into larvae and eat through their stores. Then, once they are just about ready to pupate, they stop doing anything and sit for upwards of nine months. The following spring (or summer depending on the species) the larvae once again become active, pupate, and emerge as adult bees. Rinse and repeat.

Pikes/Pines has regularly featured bees over the past decade, so for many it won’t be a surprise that the vast majority of our native bees almost never sting, are better pollinators than honey bees, and don’t create hives or stores of honey for a colony (bumble bees are the exception). They also mostly go unnoticed because many are tiny and few let you observe them closely, even in flowers. And because they don’t live their lives in even a vaguely similar way to honey bees, their conservation looks very different. In our yards and greenspaces we can take a suite of actions that support native bees through their winter siestas and most aren’t very drastic; mostly it just means leaving well enough alone or altering some garden management habits.

Many of our most common native bees nest right in the ground. Their nests are easy to miss, consisting of only a tiny pile of soil near the entrance hole and a single female bee provisioning her future brood. The curse of the soils on the Hill is that they are a jumble of churned up glacial outwash, clay, and a hundred years of human refuse – not the best substrate for a flourishing garden. Understandably those of us lucky enough to tend a bed or two of plants amend with compost or mulch to keep weeds down. These practices are broadly championed as important aspects of improving soil fertility, but they also run afoul of native bees (not to mention a host of invertebrates, fungi, bacteria, and more) who lay their eggs in the soil. That next brood of bees can become entombed, unable to dig out through the newly applied layers.

While not truly social like Honey Bees (which live in a cooperative hive), some ground nesting bees do create aggregations of separate nests. These nests that I found on San Juan Island were probably from bees in the genus Anthophora, the digger bees. Fast flying, hairy, and about the size of a bumblebee, Pacific Digger Bees, Anthophora pacifica, are a likely spring bee to see on the Hill. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

My solution to this conundrum is to mulch less heavily than I used to (an inch at most), and skip a few garden beds each winter, particularly if I notice a lot of bee activity in a specific area. Plus, a lot of the native plants I have started spreading about don’t need as heavy handed an approach to soil treatment because many are used to our native soil conditions. I also make sure I leave some areas with bare soil or gravel entirely alone. The patches of soil around rock steps in our yard always have little bees in the genus Andrena, the mining bees, nesting in them.

Mason Bees, and many of their relatives like to use any available cavity of the right diameter and depth for their nests. If you pay enough attention this coming spring, you might notice a darkly metallic bee visiting holes in house siding or other outdoor buildings. If this female bee finds the right place to start a brood you’ll eventually find it capped off with a lid, just like the one I found in my bamboo fence. The good news is that these bees essentially never excavate, they just use whatever they can find (a notable species not in our region uses snail shells) and are entirely harmless to your structures. If you find them and can’t handle the idea of sharing space in the long term, at least give the occupants a chance to emerge in the spring and fill in the holes once they’ve been vacated.

These two bundles of leaves are individual nest cells of a Megachile bee, a Leaf Cutter bee related to mason bees. Unfortunately I found them after digging into a pile of compost. I did my best to replace them but they probably didn’t make it. This kind of disturbance is very common in our managed landscapes but in some cases it can be avoided. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

Plenty of people get excited about “bug” or “bee” motels, some variously constructed bundle of holes waiting for use by invertebrates for overwintering or nesting. At face value they seem excellent things to add to our yards, and Mason Bees will readily use them. However, all too often these become hosts to nest parasites that plague bees or simply congregate bee predators to one place.

Insects can find their own spaces just fine if we don’t spend all our waking hours trying to scrub and perfect our landscaping. Most Mason Bee keepers take a very active role in the bee lifecycle to boost fruit production. Unless that’s your goal, or you are willing to put in time keeping a “bee hotel” clean and ready to use each year, it’s probably better to just let the bees naturally disperse in your landscape and be tolerant of them using your buildings’ little cracks to rear their young every once in awhile.

Inside your prize rose stems, those dead elderberry branches, and the canes of blackberries you neglected for a few years, there are likely bees waiting out winter. Several common species of bees, the Small Carpenter Bees in the genus Ceratina, and Masked Bees in the Genus Hylaeus make good use of the pithy center of a wide variety of plants native, introduced, and ornamental. They and other species also use the hollow stems of last year’s flowers.

A Masked Bee, genus Hylaeus using an exposed cut on a rose to access the easily accessible pithy center. This bit was already dying back and it really poses no threat to the rose. In a more wild setting these bees would also benefit a plant they nest in by pollinating them. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

If you are a garden cleaner but want to help native bees, you may want to think twice about your methods, or consider avoiding raking, cutting back, etc. entirely (in a lot of cases it’s not really all that necessary from a plant health or ecological perspective). I like to leave my flowers’ seed heads intact through the winter (also a nice way to feed birds without needing feeders), and deadhead, leaving the old stems in place, in spring. This gives newly emerging flower stems room to grow, new hollows for bees, and lets last year’s bees emerge without bother. And if you can handle not over managing your garden, it saves you time for more important things like growing native plants (yes, I am biased).

Just letting your plants and greenspaces do their thing is one of the best actions we can do to support overwintering bees and other invertebrates. I know it’s hard in practice and I am not suggesting everyone should let things go entirely. But leaves left in place are truly wintering places for a wide variety of species and usually are a beneficial mulch for the plants that lost the leaves in the first place. Keeping your spade out of the ground and minimizing your snipping and shearing will let insects thrive – this is one of the next steps in ecological gardening after ceasing the use of pesticides, over fertilizing, and fetishizing the lawn. And certainly a few “pest” species may come with this approach, but I’ve often found that if I give space for lots of species, many issues sort themselves out without my active involvement.

You might have read through this and wondered “ but why should I care about native bees?” If that is truly a question you are asking, you might have felt your pulse quicken when I mentioned how good Mason Bees are at pollinating. But I find the motivation to protect nature that is rooted only in knowing what services said natural things provide people is shallow at best. It’s like appreciating a car that works great, but hating it when it’s no longer functional (even if you were the reason it doesn’t start). My real answer is that bees are extremely cool, beautiful, and easy to share spaces with. They complement our greenspaces, live complex lives, and deserve our respect as fellow species on the Hill throughout the year.

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Featured Essays Heated Rivalry

Heated Rivalry Is a Step Forward for Gay Asian Representation — But Also Highlights the Burgeoning Masculinity Crisis

Shane Hollander is upending western pop culture stereotypes around Asian men

By Kevin Ng

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Published on January 27, 2026

Image credit: Sabrina Lantos/Crave

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Image credit: Sabrina Lantos/Crave

Come for the butts, stay for the exploration of queer Asian identity. When Heated Rivalry screencaps flooded my social media I didn’t think the show was for me—I’m not generally a romance fan and, despite growing up in Canada, have zero interest in hockey. But I caved, and there was a moment early in the first episode that captured my attention: the half-Asian protagonist Shane Hollander speaking to his mother and manager Yuna, the venerable Christina Chang, about the importance of being a role model to younger Asian kids. 

That brief conversation about representation could serve as a meta-narrative about Heated Rivalry itself. In Canada where I’m from, people of Asian descent are the largest and fastest-growing visible minority group. We make up over 20% of Canada’s population in comparison to the US’s 7%—that percentage increases to over 25% in big cities like Toronto and Vancouver. But you would never realize that if you flipped through your typical gay magazine, circuit party, or gay Instagram feed. Images of gay life remain distinctly whitewashed, and there was nearly thirty years between Ang Lee’s 1993 Wedding Banquet and 2022’s Fire Island to provide any mainstream representation of gay Asian life. 

Representation isn’t much better for our straight counterparts. It’s a phenomenon that shows the power that culture has over society. The “Yellow Peril” of the 1800s cast Asian men as servile, industrious, and peaceful while at the same time being beastly and uncivilized. For generations Asian men were portrayed in film as caricatures, from Christopher Lee’s Fu Manchu to Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. 

This pushback to this threat was a cultural emasculation of the Asian man. This reached a pinnacle in 1984’s Sixteen Candles, where the character of Long Duk Dong was portrayed as skinny and impotent. Even the kung fu boom of the 1990s, which brought Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Bruce Lee into the mainstream, wasn’t enough to subvert these stereotypes. Despite being amongst the most profitable and physically fit movie stars, they were never marketed as being romantically or sexually desirable. It took 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians to convince Hollywood that an Asian man could be a bankable romantic lead—and even then, Henry Golding’s career hasn’t taken off the way many predicted it would. There is, of course, Keanu Reeves, whose film career has encompassed everything from action to romantic comedy (and, arguably, the gayest possible sports film in Point Break), but his ability to pass as white likely is a contributing factor.

Which is why it’s so gratifying to see a gay Asian character as a main character in one of the biggest hits of the year. Heated Rivalry is based on a book series by Canadian author Rachel Reid, who explicitly describes the character as half-Asian (in an apparent nod to current Montréal Canadiens captain Nick Suzuki). There is, of course, a long legacy of Asian and other ethnic minority characters being whitewashed—Scarlett Johansson’s casting in 2017’s Ghost in the Shell being a prime example—so there was no guarantee on how Shane would be cast. 

The show’s creator and director Jacob Tierney not only doubles down on Shane’s Asianness, but expands upon the nuances of the character’s ethnicity beyond what is in Reid’s novel. “It was important to me because there are not a lot of people who are not white in the NHL, and there are not a lot of people who are not white as leads in romances either,” Tierney said in a Q&A after the Toronto premiere. “I think a lot about Shane’s personality is as an outsider, and to me Shane had to be Asian. It would just be monstrous to make him white.” 

Tierney’s writing is effective because it is specific—the character of Shane is not meant to represent the totality of the Asian experience. There is a precision to the way Tierney writes about Yuna, who represents a very specific kind of East Asian mother; Shane’s overwhelming perfectionism and pressure to act as a role model for all Asians; the nerd-chic of the glasses; how his white last name provides him with some level of social capital; how he folds his clothes before sex.

But the character of Shane also reveals the limits placed upon gay Asian men when it comes to masculinity. Hockey is, even within the world of professional sport, a hypermasculine space—the NHL is the one major men’s sports league with no out gay players in its history. The cultural emasculation of Asian men also extends into the gay world: the classic “no fats, no femmes, no Asians” may be less common on Grindr than it was a decade ago, but the stereotypes of Asian men as effeminate, submissive bottoms still persist. 

These feminized stereotypes of gay Asian men are, in some ways, a twisted subversion of how Asian women have historically been portrayed in cinema. From Anna May Wong to Lucy Liu, Asian women have been portrayed either as sinister femme fatales or submissive innocents. Whether threatening or deferential, Asian men and women alike are often typecast into roles where their sexuality solely exists in relation to white masculinity. We can be fetishized or exoticized, these stereotypes seem to suggest, but we are no real threat: at the end of the day, order will be restored, the white man will end up with the white girl, and all will be right with the world.

It’s no wonder, then, that gay Asian characters like Shane, or Joel Kim Booster and Conrad Ricamora’s characters in Fire Island conform to white gay standards of masculinity: the chiseled jawlines, the broad shoulders, the defined abs. A large part of this comes from the myth that representation is a zero-sum game. White, straight viewers, apparently, cannot possibly relate to characters who are not exactly like themselves; if shows about non-white characters are jockeying for screentime with shows about non-straight characters, the statistical likelihood of a gay Asian lead becomes vanishingly small. 

But without our own role models for masculinity, are we fated to fall into white standards of masculinity? 

It’s a particularly striking question when K-pop seems poised to take over American culture. KPop Demon Hunters was Netflix’s unexpected runaway success of 2025, offering an entirely different aesthetic of masculinity shaped by the open vulnerability and slim androgyny of BTS and Exo. Soon, Asian men will be caught between two wildly different masculine ideals, both culturally and aesthetically restrictive in their own ways—though two options are better than one. But in a predominantly white society the choice is clear: conforming to the aesthetic ideals of the dominant culture gives greater access to cultural and political capital.

You can see this clearly walking down the streets of San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, or Toronto: the hordes of Asian tech and finance bros with their Patagonia vests and Equinox memberships, manifesting their version of the American Dream. Andrew Yang’s cryptocurrency-forward, Joe Rogan-adjacent political career epitomizes both the folly and tragedy of trying to conform to white standards of masculinity for widespread acceptance, whether on television or in real life.

Shane Hollander is, of course, a top-ranked hockey player, and it would be ridiculous for him not to be muscular. But the construction of masculinity is so much more than physical appearance, even if the show’s marketing has been able to capitalize off the proliferation of thirsty screen grabs. Confidence, dominance, control: all of these are explored as facets of Shane’s personality and shapes how he manages (or doesn’t manage) his relationships. 

To me it’s not surprising that he struggles, on account of not just his sexuality but his ethnicity, to navigate life off the rink within the white, hypermasculine world of competitive hockey. It’s equally unsurprising that Shane and Ilya, as cultural outsiders in their own ways, are not offered the whirlwind fairytale romance of Scott and Kip—and thank goodness for that. The emotional payoff of Shane and Ilya’s eventual happy ending is so much the more satisfying after seeing how each has struggled to define themself in relationship to their respective cultures.

Shane’s ethnicity is brought up three times in the series: once with a hockey executive, once with his then-girlfriend Rose Landry, and in the final episode when Ilya asks about Shane’s parents. In all of these conversations there is an ambiguity—his ethnicity is at once a marketing boon and liability, one that automatically makes him a candidate to be bullied in his youth and then a role model in adulthood. Shane’s ethnicity is always explored in relation to others, whether it be his bosses, fans, sponsors, or peers. In each of these interactions, you see how his ethnicity comes with the weight of expectation, of fulfilling a particular role—and you see how that expectation prevents him from leading an authentic, free life. There’s satisfaction, too, in using hockey—the whitest major league sport—as a medium through which to explore queer Asian masculinity, as if subverting the decentering and desexualization of Asian men in the UFC world despite its origins in Asian martial arts.

It’s notable that both Reid’s books and Tierney’s television series have been a hit amongst women, a fact that they attribute to the fact that many women crave seeing a world free of the patriarchal power dynamics of straight relationships. Yet what this relationship offers is an opportunity to explore the nuances of how hierarchies in power and dominance can be viewed through the synergistic or competing lenses of gender and race. These hierarchies are materialized in Shane and Ilya’s professional rivalry, which poses a further barrier to unmasculine displays of tenderness or intimacy beyond the masculine ideals of race, country, and career. We each embody a multitude of patriarchies.

What Reid and Tierney understand is that the experience of an ethnic minority is similar in many ways to that of being queer. There’s a constant need to code-switch, to surveil one’s environment in order to understand which aspects of one’s identity are safe or advantageous to reveal, and a guilt in either conforming or subverting stereotypes. It’s doubly exhausting when both of these identities are at play, and when the expectations and stereotypes of both identities begin to intersect and deviate. Heated Rivalry succeeds because it serves as a meta-narrative about queer Asian identity itself: How much should it divulge about its sexuality versus its ethnicity? How does it conform to or subvert gender tropes? And how does its proximity to whiteness inform its success?[end-mark]

The post <i>Heated Rivalry</i> Is a Step Forward for Gay Asian Representation — But Also Highlights the Burgeoning Masculinity Crisis appeared first on Reactor.

I've been delivering food on a bike for over a year and a half. After being assaulted by some chud in Belltown today, I need to get some shit off my chest that isn't just that guy's hand. 

Y'all motherfuckers who complain about the music I crank must've forgotten what city you're in. Fuck off to the suburbs, NIMBY scum.

Dumbfucks occupying the bike lanes when the sidewalk is literally just a few feet to the side, you're one of the main reasons I crank loud music, and even that's not enough to overpower your earbuds, you fucking bollards. Double fuck you to you brainlets who park your cars in the bike lanes, which is illegal, BTW. Y'all create the danger you then blame us for, just like a good Republican.

Clones who jokingly or sincerely try to trick me into giving you someone else's order, you're just fucking boring and unoriginal. 

To the white men (yes, it's always white men) who actually get hostile and try to pick fights with me while I'm on the clock, like the one who did today, you call me things like a loser and a bitch, and yet you are only projecting the reality about yourself. Funny how you run away when one of the locals comes to defend me, since doing so myself would cost my job. You have to be a real massive piece of shit to pick a fight with someone doing their job. Oh, and blaming me for your violence is textbook abuser behavior. What was that about a male loneliness epidemic? Y'all are actually pathetic, and maybe the government should look into disarming you instead of trans people. 

I was raised by and around military, cops, and other various authoritarian types. I've lived on and off the streets since becoming an adult a couple decades ago, and I've wrecked a couple Nazis and even an infamous Proud Boy. I've been stabbed in the chest by a tweaker with a screwdriver, who I then proceeded to remove from the bus myself. Afterwards, I clocked in, completed a shift, and then went to get a tetanus shot. I like to put metal rods in my urethra for pleasure. I'm not scared of any of you.

Although, in general, I get a lot more love from folks who understand and appreciate the hazards involved than I do hate from people who clearly need a psychedelic enema, and it means the world to me.

Double thank you to folks who tip well.

Love, 

The Psycho Bike Ho

Do you need to get something off your chest? Submit an I, Anonymous and we'll illustrate it! Send your unsigned rant, love letter, confession, or accusation to ianonymous@thestranger.com. Please remember to change the names of the innocent and the guilty.