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Ericaceae family
Alpine Bearberry Arctostaphylos alpina
NativeSpecialist-bee host
Alpine Bearberry is a perennial shrub native to Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. It grows to 0.5 ft and blooms Mar in full sun – part shade, with black fruit. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Arctous alpina, the alpine bearberry, mountain bearberry or black bearberry, is a dwarf shrub in the heather family Ericaceae. The basionym of this species is Arbutus alpina L.. Wikipedia →
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Species characteristics from USDA PLANTS (public domain) + TRY (CC BY) — general guidance, not a
guarantee for your exact site. Deer "browsing" is documented palatability, not a deer-proof claim.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most
songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is
a moderate genus.
Recorded feeding on Arctostaphylos in North America, including:
Keystone count (genus-level) from Warren II 2026 (CC0) · Tallamy host-use records. Named species (a documented Nearctic sample, not exhaustive) from NHM HOSTS (CC0). ✦ = recorded on this exact species.
✦ Beesspecialist-bee host▸
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen
from particular plant genera. Arctostaphylos is a recorded
specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
Species thumbnails re-hosted from iNaturalist — Creative Commons, credited per image (hover for credit). Click any species to see it on iNaturalist. Not exhaustive; many taxa have no openly-licensed photo yet.
Same genus / family, ranked by ecological value — from the PlantKey catalog
How we know this (1)Methods & honest limits ▸
PhotosynthesisDirect fact
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
Kattge, J. et al. TRY plant trait database — Categorical Traits Dataset (2012).
Derived values are computed from open data by a published method — labelled, cited, and never shown as a direct observation.
Full methodology →
Spot an error or have a better photo? Every field links to its source, and the whole dataset is open.
Cite this pageOpen data, please attribute ▸
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
