Don’t Forget Butterflies! Our Pollination Crisis Is About More Than Honeybees b4in.org/j58z When President Obama signed an order last week creating a task force that will seek to promote pollinator health, honeybees grabbed the headlines. “Obama announces plan to save honeybees,” CNN proclaimed. “White House creates new honeybee task force,” the Wire echoed. “White House task force charged with saving bees from mysterious decline,” the Guardian added, referencing the colony collapse disorder that contributed to the death of 23 percent of managed honeybees last winter. But those headlines overlooked the most important part of the presidential order: it encompassed all pollinators, including birds, bats, native bees, and butterflies — not just honeybees. The memorandum will spur the creation, within the next 180 days, of a National Pollinator Health Strategy that will lay out ways for the U.S. to better study and better tackle the problems facing pollinators, both wild and managed. While the plight of bees has gotten deserved attention of late, many species of pollinators face the same threats: habitat destruction, climate-induced changes in flowering and weather patterns, and in some cases, pesticides. Wayne Esaias, director of NASA’s HoneyBee Net, said that while his work involves using honeybee hives to track changes in nectar flow over time to see how climate change is impacting honeybees, the problems wild pollinators face worry him more than the plight of managed honeybees. We hardly know all their names. “Our natural ecosystems depend not on the honeybee for pollination, but on our native bees and native pollinators,” Esaias said. “And we hardly know all their names.” Elusive Subjects Esaias’ assessment that the full spectrum of pollinating insects hasn’t even been identified is one part of a major weakness in the study of insect pollinators in the U.S., especially native bees. There are about 4,000 species of bees in North America, and about 400 haven’t been identified yet. That’s because there are only “a handful” of people who are familiar enough with bees to tell one species from another, said Sam Droege, biologist at the USGS’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center and expert on wild bees. “You can’t identify them on the wing like a butterfly,” he said. “A bee on the wing is a little black dot, and they move really fast, and a lot of those little black dots look essentially the same until you get them under a 60 power microscope.” With managed honeybees, it’s easy to figure out how populations are doing. Honeybees — which didn’t exist in North America before settlers brought hives over from Europe — live in hives and are managed by beekeepers, so determining the percentage of bee losses that have occurred over the course of a year or a decade involves surveying those beekeepers. More b4in.org/j58z
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 19:03:22 +0000
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