Rebecca Clarren

Outside the trees bloom pink, yellow daffodils cluster near the sidewalk and my lawn has suddenly sprouted into a large bushy rug that has prompted chilly looks from my neighbors. To my untrained eye, spring has arrived in its usual showy fashion, but I’m missing something. We all are.

New data by bee biologists indicate steep declines of three common bumble bees species, including the Western Bumble Bee, found from the Rocky Mountains and California up into Alaska. These native populations of bees are important pollinators of wild flowering plants and crops. Though there are a number of plausible reasons for these shrinking populations, such as climate change, habitat loss and pesticides, Dr Robbin Thorp, an entomologist at U.C. Davis, suspects a more acute cause.
In the early 1990s, two companies that commercially rear bumblebees shipped American Eastern and Western bumblebees to their main rearing facilities in Europe and then returned them to the United States months later for sale to agribusinesses and hothouse tomato producers. Thorp hypothesizes that while on their European vacation, those bees were infected with a pathogen. Upon their return to the US they promptly infected the Western, Rusty-patched and Yellow-banded Bumble Bees. Declines in these wild bees have been increasingly apparent since the late 1990s. (This research is ongoing and hasn’t yet been published – sorry no link to the report yet.)

After being taken for granted for hundreds of years, bees suddenly became headline news last year with reports that Colony Collapse Disorder was wiping out honeybees throughout the country. As reported by the Christian Science Monitor and High Country News in the Silence of Bees, commercial beekeepers saw losses of between 50 and 90 percent. Because honeybees pollinate every third bite of food ingested by Americans and generate $14 billion in produce, reports the Monitor, there’s major concern that these honeybee deaths will disrupt the food supply.

In the face of Colony Collapse Disorder, some farmers have been working to attract and employ native bees to pollinate their crops, as reported by Lisa Jones in High Country News’ Native Hum. (Also, for more information about research with native bees, read this from the latest issue of Orion.) However, the new data on wild bumblebees is a real buzz kill for such efforts.

These declines should alarm us all. Bumblebees can fly in cooler temperatures and lower light than other bees, making them excellent crop pollinators as well. In Britain and the Netherlands, where multiple bumblebee species are extinct, there are fewer insect pollinated plants, according to a 2006 study published in Science.

“We’ve seen habitat destruction from invasive plants for years in the west,” says Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Xerces Society, a Portland-based non-profit that works to protect invertebrates. “Now we’re seeing invasive diseases come in to take out wildlife. We’re going to be facing this more and more, especially with our bees.”

To spread the word about the plight of these bumble bees and to solicit information about their current status, Xerces has created a series of clever WANTED posters and distributed 600 of them to bee researchers, entomologists, native plant societies and environmental groups. To order your own WANTED poster contact Black at sblack@xerces.org.

In the face of the news about bumble bee declines, some in agribusiness say the solution is to simply produce more Eastern Bumblebees and ship them to farms and fields here in the west. For example, Koppert Biological Systems, a commercial pollination company wants to ship Eastern Bumblebees to California to pollinate almonds. Not only is there no reliable data to show these eastern bees would pollinate almonds, says Black, but there’s also not any assurances that they wouldn’t increase the spread of disease. This idea is shortsighted and likely to end up stinging us all in the behind.

What we need is much simpler: we should diversify farms with better habitat so that farmers cultivate their own pollinators from local bee populations. Xerces is putting pressure on the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to strengthen regulations that cover insect transportation in the hopes of preventing future disease transmission. This is also sound action.

So many environmental conflicts today are driven by NIMBYism (not in my backyard syndrome); in the case of the bumblebee plight we have the opportunity to rather create solutions in our backyards.

The Xerces Society website lists bumble bee supportive plants you can grow in your backyard and offers instruction on how to make a nest for native bees. Groups like the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides provide great information about how to get rid of insects and bugs without insecticides, a sure bee-killer.