The Buzz on Native Pollinators
By Laura Tangley, National Wildlife
May 18, 2009
As European honeybees decline, indigenous bees and other pollinating animals can provide a backup—with a little help from their human friends
WHEN ECOLOGIST Rachel Winfree set out to survey native bees in the Delaware Valley of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, she was not optimistic about her results. Not only is the region far from any known hot spots of bee diversity, such as the U.S. Southwest, “New Jersey is also the most densely populated state in the country,” says Winfree, an assistant professor in the Department of Entomology at Rutgers University. “I was worried that after getting funding and hiring a staff, the project would turn out to be a waste of time.”
Read the entire article on the National Wildlife Federation website.
August 7th, 2009 at 7:26 am
To whom it may concern,
I have read some but impossibly not all articles concerning the decline of native pollinators and CCD of the Honey Bee. What occurred to me has probably already been research but I’ve never seen any references to what occurred to me. Is CCD occurring in the native regions of the honey bee? If not, might CCD be from the honey bee species not receiving nectar/pollen from the plants it evolved with? Maybe there are particular nutrients in the plants that the honeybee evolved with that it is not getting in its non-native habitat? Maybe there are other environmental factors that are absent in the the non-native habitat.
December 20th, 2009 at 11:30 am
Dear Cecelia Jokerst:
The honeybee is not a new world native. So what I can tell you frommy beekeeper friend in oracle,Az. is that his free ranging bees seem to be doing well or as well as can be expected in our nearly 10 year drought in the SW. His bees feed on numerous species of flowers, though they will feed most heavily on what is blooming in abundance. Transported which are moved in to polinate a single crop seem to be having the worst problems. They also since this happens in heavy agricultural areas have the highest loads of insecticide and fungicide residues.
I think this indicates a multi stress problem. Researchers tend to hate such multi casual problems. In part because they are very hard to tease apart. They also tend not to have a “Eureka moment”—” I have found IT”.