Imagine living in a world without bees or other pollinators! It would be a world without flowers, fruit, even a cup of coffee. A world, even, without chocolate!
Thanks to the wonderful work of bees, butterflies, birds, and other animal pollinators, the world's flowering plants are able to reproduce and bear fruit, providing many of the foods we eat, the plant materials we and other organisms use, and the beauty we see around us. Yet today, there is evidence indicating alarming pollinator population declines worldwide.
Domesticated honey bees are not the only pollinators in trouble these days. Many species of butterflies, moths, birds, bats and other pollinators are also in retreat, threatening not only the production of commercial crops but also a wide range of flowering plants, including rare and endangered species.
"Action must be taken to reverse these trends," says Stephen Buchmann, an entomologist formerly with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Tucson, Arizona. According to Buchmann, only a few of these pollinators (mainly Hawaiian bird species) are protected by the Federal Endangered Species Act. "This is simply because the world is focused on the charismatic megafauna--the lions and tigers and bears," he says. "The little things that run the world, including bees, butterflies, bats and hummingbirds, go unnoticed and unprotected until it is sometimes too late."
The latest edition (June, 2008) of "The Very Handy Manual: How to Catch and Identify Bees and Manage a Collection" is now available!
Compiled mainly by Sam Droege at the USGS Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab with input from specialist researchers and taxonomists over several years from 2004-2008, this guide provides detailed instructions on bee monitoring techniques including specimen collection, processing and management; bee identification; and more!
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The Senate passed Resolution 580 "Recognizing the importance of pollinators to ecosystem health and agriculture in the United States and the value of partnership efforts to increase awareness about pollinators and support for protecting and sustaining pollinators by designating June 24 though June 30, 2007 as 'National Pollinator Week'." Read Resolution 580. National Pollinator Week will occur June 22 through June 28, 2009. To learn more about this year's events, click here.
Additionally, Mike Johans, Secretary of Agriculture at the United States Department of Agriculture, issued a proclamation calling upon the people of the United States to join in celebrating the vital significance of pollinators to agriculture and to public lands as well as the Department's conservation assistance to farmers and ranchers and its management of ecosystems providing valuable pollinator habitats through the Nation, and recognizing National Pollinator Week. Read the Proclamation (University of Arizona Press).
National Academy of Sciences released a Report on the Status of Pollinators in North America on October 18, 2006. The report provides an analysis of the status of managed and unmanaged pollinator populations in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It can be purchased from the National Academies Press web site. Free PDF copies of the Report in Brief or the Executive Summary are also available for download from the web.
Quote: "For most North American pollinator species, long-term population data are lacking and knowledge of their basic ecology is incomplete."
World Bees Checklist Completed!
Together with specialists around the world, the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS), a partner of the NBII, has completed a checklist of the 19,436 named bee species of the world. The entire checklist (with some synonyms and subspecies) is fully integrated into the ITIS database and can be accessed online at http://www.itis.gov/beechecklist.html.
"The bee checklist acts as a taxonomic 'Rosetta Stone' that will enhance communication, information exchange and data repatriation about bees. The completed checklist is a first step in modeling and forecasting future population trends," Mike Ruggiero, ITIS.
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National Pollinator Week will occur June 22 through June 28, 2009. To learn more about this year's events,