During the breeding season, animals make foraging movements in search of food and dispersal movements in search of nesting sites. For central-place foragers like solitary bees, dispersal and foraging are discrete movement types: foraging occurs frequently, often daily, whereas dispersal occurs infrequently, possibly only once or twice in an organism’s life. Although we have a decent understanding of solitary bee foraging biology, similar studies on dispersal are rarer because of the difficulty of detecting long-distance movements, and the difficulty of identifying suitable dispersal locations. Here, we document both dispersal and foraging distances of the ground-nesting solitary bee Colletes validus over two years to test whether foraging and dispersal occur over similar distances. We paint-marked actively nesting female bees, tracked their movements among nesting sites (dispersal) and flower patches (foraging) by surveying for marked females throughout the nesting season, and fit Weibull kernels to the distributions of observed movement distances. Mean foraging and dispersal movement distances were similar; however, the top 1% dispersal distance (1292m) was nearly twice as great as the top 1% foraging distance (554m). Our study provides first direct estimates of dispersal distance for any solitary bee, and sets the stage for further research in similar species.