While the rusty patched bumble bee was just recently recommended for endangered species status by the United States Fish and Wildlife service earlier this month, things are only getting worse for bees, and the United States government is starting to take notice.
In a new decree by the United States government, seven Hawaii-based yellow-faced bee species have now been listed as endangered for the first time.
Among the things that are impacting the populations of these species, according to the press release, are:
- Habitat loss because of development of land for human living
- Predation by other animals who like to eat the species in question
- Natural disasters that destroy habitats and kill countless specimens
- Human intervention that poisons or kills the species
- Vulnerability from low numbers and the inability to reproduce quickly enough
- Competition from invasive species that aren’t native to the region
By being listed as endangered, harsh consequences will be imposed on people who do things to harm all the species and preservation attempts will kick in following the end of October to try and prevent them from dying out.
A lot of the population problems for bees can be attributed to human intervention. Just recently, millions of South Carolina-based bees were killed by insecticides dropped by the local government to control mosquitoes and Zika transmission during the wrong time of the day by accident. This obviously could have been avoided.
If you’re seeing fewer bees around, there’s probably a good reason for it. They’re finding it hard to stay around with everything that’s been going on in the environment. Forest fires, global warming, tsunamis, flooding, hurricanes, and more threaten their existence and are very real disasters.
With some little extra protection efforts from experts, we could probably turn around what looks like a future becoming bleak for these seven bee species, but it will take work.
Source: Federal Register Journal of the United States Government via Xerces Society