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US Puts Bumblebee On the Endangered Species List For First Time (npr.org)
For the first time for a bumblebee and a bee species in the U.S., the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has designated the bumblebee an endangered species. The protected status goes into effect on February 10, and includes requirements for federal protections and the development of a recovery plan. NPR reports: "Today's Endangered Species listing is the best -- and probably last -- hope for the recovery of the rusty patched bumble bee," NRDC Senior Attorney Rebecca Riley said in a statement from the Xerces Society, which advocates for invertebrates. "Bumble bees are dying off, vanishing from our farms, gardens, and parks, where they were once found in great numbers." Large parts of the Eastern and Midwestern United States were once crawling with these bees, Bombus affinis, but the bees have suffered a dramatic decline in the last two decades due to habitat loss and degradation, along with pathogens and pesticides. Indeed, the bee was found in 31 states and Canadian provinces before the mid- to late-1990s, according to the final rule published in the Federal Register. But since 2000, it has been reported in only 13 states and Ontario, Canada. It has seen an 88 percent decline in the number of populations and an 87 percent loss in the amount of territory it inhabits. This means the species is vulnerable to extinction, the rule says, even without further habitat loss or insecticide exposure. Canada designated the species as endangered in 2012.
If you want information including things that you might be able to do take a look at Bumble Bee Watch (http://www.bumblebeewatch.org/) or the Xerces Society page on bumblebees (http://www.xerces.org/bumblebees/). The University of Maine in Farmington has also been tracking the decline of several of the species native to Maine (http://mainebumblebeeatlas.umf.maine.edu/), and other state universities may have similar programs going on.
fencepost
just a little off
It's not the roundup that's doing it, it's neonicotinoid insecticides. If you wanted to specifically design something to genocide bees, neonic insecticides would be about as close to ideal as you could get. So the solution to the problem would be to put neonics on the endangered-species list, and hope they fade out of the environment before the bees do.
Well. Indirectly, it does. Roundup kills many "weed" that are actually useful wild plants that bumblebees feed on. The western "green grass patch" is an ecological desert. No flowers for insects to feed on, no insects for birds to feed on...
If you let your grass grow a little wild your garden will attract many small creatures, and shortly after many birds, and mammals such as hedgehogs who feed on insects... Then you can spend a lot of fun times with family observing nature without going far away from home.
Also Roundup fumes are probably giving your dad cancer right now. Maybe you could talk him out of using this shit, no?
Even worse, when a Federal Agent overhears your kid singing about brining home a baby bumble bee at preschool and throws him or her into jail.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
That's exactly what DID happen when the EU banned Neonics a year or two ago. Bayer has been on a massive add-campaign ever since to try to get the ban lifted by claiming their pesticides are totally harmless to bees, bees actually like the stuff - they thrive when you spray them with it and think of all the job losses if we our massive multinational company has one less product to sell (which somehow didn't stop them from refusing to sell lethal injection meds to the US) etc. etc. etc.
Eventually they managed to raise enough dust to get the EU Safety Authority to set up a review committee to reconsider the decision. At time of writing the committee's results are not yet in... but I somehow have this idea that a lot of the committee members have been living large of late...
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The problem is that neonicotinoids are about as close to an ideal insecticide as we could hope to have. They're effective on a broad spectrum of insects, they don't harm plants, and they're really quite safe around mammals. For example, dinotefuran has an oral and dermal LD50 in rats of > 2000mg/kg, is not known to be carcinogenic, and is not known to be a neurotoxin. It's also essentially non-toxic to birds, fish, and aquatic invertebrates (important because of chemical run-off.) I'm not saying I'd sprinkle it on my breakfast cereal, but I wouldn't get sick from it.
They just happen to be 50 times as lethal to bees as to any other insect. So even the lowest doses used to control economically damaging pests are still going to kill huge numbers of bees, because the tainted nectar and pollen that comes back with the bees feeds the colonies.
I really like the stuff for INDOOR control of greenhouse pests. Outdoors, I won't use it.
John
Bumble bees disappearing is alarming, and it could have a number of causes but no one is quite yet sure exactly what is the main cause or if several causes are combining (likely). I've been to several research presentations lately from scientists researching bee health and bee loss. They know that neonics kill bees (they kill lots of insects). But the thing you have to realize is that very few farmers apply neonics as a spray where it kills indiscriminately. Almost all neonic use is in seed treatments that go underground and make the plants toxic to insects that would eat them. Also, bees (but not bumblebees) are doing quite well in areas that have high use of neonic seed treatments, like Alberta.
In other areas the situation is not nearly as good for many bee species. And neonics are suspected to play a role, though neonics are usually not sprayed. What it could be is vacuum planters planting corn and beans are blowing neonic-laced dust into the air which is causing the damage. In Alberta, planting is largely done with air seeders which blow dust into the soil, not the air, where bees are not exposed nearly as much to it.
So things aren't as simple as the comments so far want to make it. Banning of neonic spray does make some sense. But if they were banned outright, to save the food crops farmers will have to spray more insecticides on the plants during the early growth stages, which is ultimately more harmful to everyone. Not only does that kill problem insects, it kills bumble bees and beneficials indiscriminately.
One final comment on habitat loss. This indeed could be contributing. As far as farmland goes, though, very little land is being converted from wild to farming in North America these days. Nearly all habitat loss comes from urban development. So don't go blaming farmers for habitat loss in that regard. As well, the US and Canada has quite large wilderness areas that have never been touched by agriculture, and bumble bees seem to be in decline everywhere. And it could be that climate change is playing as big a role as neonics ever did in this decline.
It's a complicated story. Likely humans play a major role, but how to fix this no on really knows.