Some of California's most important insects seem to have vanished. The first statewide survey of bumble bee species in 40 years suggests that populations of once-abundant bumble bee species may have suffered serious decline. bumble bees don't make honey for people to eat. bumble bees are native to North America and are important pollinators. bumble bees thrive in California. Half of the country's bumble bees are found in the state. The Sierra Nevada, an area rich in bee species, is where bumble bees originated. California is a hot spot for the big problems that plague bees. Bee habitats are being pushed out by human settlements. The Central Valley has decimated the grassland where bees once thrived and introduced pesticides that can kill bumble bees or reduce important activity like reproducing and eating. Climate change is hitting the state hard, threatening bee habitats and causing disruptions as some flowers bloom earlier. Bee populations in multiple habitats were documented in a survey conducted in the early 1980s by a renowned entomologist. The survey was inspired by his work, according to Woodard. If you go to a place where Robbin THORP would have visited in the 80s, can you take a snapshot of bees in one place at a time and see the patterns that he saw? Most of the answer is yes. Our state has undergone a lot of changes when it comes to bumble bee populations. A wide variety of bee habitats and six different ecosystems were represented by the 17 sites visited by Woodard and her labmates. The bees were taken back to the lab for identification after they were collected at each site.
Woodard said that the study was meant to give the researchers an idea of what species were common in each area.
The results for some bees were disappointing but not surprising. She didn't expect to find Bombus franklini or Franklin's bumblebee in the survey because of their decline in population.
California's bees have always been rare, but now they are so rare that no one has seen them in more than two decades.
Some of the results were quite shocking. Bombus vosneseii, also known as the yellow-faced bumblebee, was the most common bee. The range and sampling of this bee was much more limited than it was back in the day, according to Woodard.
She said she couldn't find it when she went to places where she should have seen it. It looks like it is doing well, but if you compare it to itself, you are not seeing it the way you used to. It was really sad.
The collection of bees at four sites in Southern California weren't included in the study because researchers couldn't find more than 10 bees per site
I heard a lot of stories of people saying that we don't have bees anymore and that they used to have them. We are going to have more unfortunate surprises if we look for these bees more often.
There are policy solutions in play that could help bee populations, such as banning certain pesticides, and listing more species under both state and federal extinction lists. She says that citizen-led survey projects like California'sBumble Bee Atlas project, which trains ordinary people to look for and identify bees, are able to generate a much broader set of data than what her survey provided.
The population size of bumble bees can change over time. There are a lot of reasons why it is difficult to find a bumblebee.
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