US Fish and Wildlife:
In September 2016, (click here) the Service listed 7 species of yellow-faced bees as endangered. These were the first bees in the United States listed under the ESA. However, they are only found in Hawaii and they are not bumble bees. The rusty patched bumble bee is the first bee listed in the Continental United States (all states outside of Hawaii) and it is the first bumble bee listed....
February 6, 2020
By Bob Berwyn
Type "bumblebees" into Google (click here) and one of the first results is a University of Minnesota webpage describing how the furry, flying pollinators have "special adaptations for colder weather including their long, thick hair, and are more commonly found in colder climates."
That's a good clue that they will face challenges in a warming world, and new research by scientists at the University of Ottawa suggests that extreme heat waves have already driven some local North American and European bumblebee populations to the edge of extinction.
Measurements of bumblebee species over time "provide evidence of rapid and widespread declines across Europe and North America," the authors of the study wrote. More frequent extreme heat waves with temperatures higher than bees can tolerate help explain the "widespread bumblebee decline," they added....
..."Bumblebees are disappearing from areas eight times as fast as they are recolonizing others," he said. "They are the best pollinators in wild landscapes and really important for crops like tomatoes, squash and berries."
The results of the paper are surprisingly robust, given the lack of basic information in North America about bumblebee distribution and abundance, said University of Maryland biologist David Inouye, who has studied bumblebees at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado. He was not involved in the new study, but some of his research is cited by the authors.
"There is still very little, if anything, known about how most of the 4,000 native bee species in the USA are doing," Inouye said. A new federal monitoring effort could help improve the situation, he added.
The new study analyzed more than half a million bumblebee observations of 66 species in Europe and North America from two time periods; 1901 to 1974 and 2000 to 2014. The researchers mapped where the bees are now compared to where they used to be historically, and matched those records with changes in temperature and precipitation....
