In recent years, ecologists have focused on describing patterns of change in wild bee communities, but we know little about the population-level mechanisms driving those changes. We believe this emphasis on community-level patterns stems from two misconceptions: the perceptions that population-level studies are too conceptually narrow to provide rigorous inference, and that studying bees throughout their life cycles is prohibitively challenging without pinned specimens. Here, we combat these ideas. First, when population-level studies are couched in ecological theory, they can also have a broad scope of inference. And second, studies of wild bees throughout their life cycles are possible because dozens of species can be identified to species in the field. More generally, we emphasize the need to link data-rich pattern-oriented approaches in ecology with an understanding of the basic biology and mechanisms that generate those patterns.