Days before popular vote loser Donald Trump was installed in the Whitehouse and our gut wrenching national nightmare began, the US Fish and Wildlife Service added the rusty-patched bumblebee to the endangered species list. This bumble bee, was a pollinator of large parts of the Eastern and Mid-Western short and tall grass prairie habitats (they are also key pollinators of apples, plums, onions, melons, squash, alfalfa and peppers.), but it has experienced a dramatic decline in population due to loss of habitat, pathogens and pesticides. It is the first North American bumble bee that the Endangered Species Act now protects (In late 2016, the Fish and Wildlife Service gave endangered status to seven species of yellow-faced bees native to Hawaii, the first time any U.S. bees received this kind of protection). The new rule was to be implemented in February of 2017 but Trump interfered at the urging of several corporations and the effective date was postponed until late March.
GrrlScientist, a contributor for Forbes Magazine writes:
This bee's dramatic decline is not the result of any one event. Instead, it is the result of many human-caused factors that feed back on each other and amplify their effects. Both urban and agricultural sprawl certainly play an important role. Agriculture's shift from small family farms producing a variety of crops to huge corporate monopolies that produce just one or two crops have destroyed vast stretches of available habitat fragments filled with native wildflowers and terrain that feed and house bumble bees and other native pollinator species.
"Of additional concern is the widespread use of persistent, long-lasting, highly toxic insecticides within the range of the rusty patched bumble bee, which pose a threat to its continued existence," said Sarina Jepsen, Director of Endangered Species and Aquatic Conservation at the Xerces Society.
CropLife America, the trade group representing pesticide manufacturers, mentioned in a statement that “field studies have consistently found no unreasonable adverse effects on pollinator populations when pesticides are applied according to label directions.” But the USFWS proposes that native bumble bees could be more sensitive to the effects of pesticides than domesticated commercial honeybees.
“There is a whole suite of insecticides that are broadly used throughout North America and the only species that the toxicity has been tested on is the honeybee,” pointed out Rich Hatfield, a conservation biologist with the Xerces Society who helped launch the petition to list the rusty patched bumble bee.
The year is 2050, and as climate change takes hold the bees will be the first to fall
The bumblebees will be first to go. As the year 2050 passes, and – if current projections are accurate – we slide past the two degrees centigrade temperature increase agreed upon the Paris climate accord, these key pollinators will start to feel the pressure of climate change. Worker bees live for just five or six weeks, and spend much of their time bringing back pollen and nectar to feed young in their colony or gathering plant resin to reinforce their nest.
In heat waves, they find themselves too dazed to fly properly. “They really get kind of dopey and incapable of moving reliably and safely,” says Jeremy Kerr at the University of Ottawa in Canada. As the decades march on, the number of deadly heat waves is set to increase. By the year 2100, up to 74 per cent of the world’s population is projected to experience more than 20 days of lethal heat levels every year. And heat levels that are lethal to humans aren't good news for bees either.
With worker bees out of action, their nests are no longer as well-provisioned and will become unable to breed healthy queen bees. Queens are the only bumblebees that can reproduce so if a nest isn’t able to provide new ones the overall number of colonies will start to dwindle. After 15 years in decline, the bumblebees may eventually die out altogether, their colonies slowly ground down by year after year of intense hot spells.
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