[Pollinator] Disease dooming native bumblebees

[Sarina Jepsen]

[] <http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/home/>

Thursday, January 14, 2010

<http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/home/> 
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2010787441_bumblebee14m.html
 

ERIKA SCHULTZ / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Native bumblebees, such as this western bumblebee, are in trouble, 
victims of diseases some scientists say are spread by commercial 
bumblebees.


  *Disease dooming native bumblebees*

By Lynda V. Mapes

Seattle Times staff reporter

They work in the cold when honeybees are still snug in their hives, and 
cloudy days don't stop them either.

Bumblebees are workhorse pollinators, depended on to pollinate 
everything from cranberries and blueberries to hothouse tomatoes.

But native bumblebees are in trouble, victims of diseases some 
scientists say are spread by commercial bumblebees shipped around North 
America to pollinate crops.

While much attention has been given to the plight of European honeybees, 
dying in droves in so-called colony collapse disorder, the sharp decline 
of some species of native bumblebees has been largely overlooked.

The Xerces Society, based in Portland, several other environment groups 
and prominent entomologists joined together this week in supporting a 
citizen petition asking the U.S. Department of Agriculture to regulate 
the commercial bumblebee industry.

The petition asks the department to ban shipments of bumblebees outside 
their native range, and to require that bumblebees shipped within their 
native habitat be certified as disease free.

Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Xerces Society, said the 
rules are needed to prevent further decline of native bumblebees already 
in deep trouble, including the western bumblebee, the fuzzy bee of every 
Northwest kid's summer.

"The western bumblebee was one of the most common. If you lived in 
Seattle, Olympia, Vancouver, this is a bumblebee you would see in forest 
edges, clearings, yards," Black said. "Today it is gone from pretty much 
the entire Puget Sound area, as well as east of the Cascades."

He partly blames the escape of East Coast bumblebees, buzzing out of the 
vents of commercial greenhouses around the country where the bees have 
been shipped to pollinate crops.

They can carry diseases to which native bees ­ there are about 30 
species on the Pacific Coast ­ have no resistance.

The Department of Agriculture had no immediate comment on the proposal, 
said Larry Hawkins, a spokesman for the agency.

States take a varied approach to bumblebee regulation. Oregon bans all 
importation of commercial bumblebees to protect native stocks, said Dan 
Hilburn, administrator of the plant division for the Oregon Department 
of Agriculture. Washington doesn't regulate bumblebee shipments at all.

Rene Ruiter, general manager for Koppert Biological Systems in Romulus, 
Mich., one of two companies commercially growing and shipping bumblebees 
in North America, said his company already has to certify its bees as 
disease free for its exports to Canada and Mexico.

Doing so for domestic shipments might not be a burden, depending on how 
a rule was written, he said.

In business since 1994, his company serves growers using bumblebees to 
pollinate greenhouse tomatoes, including about 800 acres in the United 
States. Only bumblebees can execute the deft maneuver required to 
pollinate a hothouse tomato, vibrating their entire fuzzy body to shake 
pollen loose.

But under regulations requested in the petition, the company's shipments 
of /Bombus impatiens/, a bumblebee native of the Eastern United States, 
would be shut down to the West.

"That's life," Ruiter said, "but we disagree with it. Our bees are 
already certified disease free for export and it's not as if we have one 
bee for export and another for shipping in the U.S."

He bristled at a study published in 2008 documenting much higher disease 
rates among wild bees collected close to greenhouses in Canada. "Those 
weren't our bees," he said.

Michael Otterstatter, a research biologist who did the work for the 
paper while at the University of Toronto, said the results of the study 
alarmed him.

The levels of disease around the greenhouses was much greater than he 
found in wild populations.

"It was a nasty shock," Otterstatter said. "I was holding on to the idea 
that even if the commercial bees are sick, they were isolated enough 
that they would not be having an effect on the native pollinators. But 
that turned out not to be the case."

/Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes at seattletimes.com 
<mailto:lmapes at seattletimes.com>

/Copyright © The Seattle Times Company


*************************
Scott Hoffman Black
Ecologist/Entomologist
Executive Director
The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation
4828 SE Hawthorne
Portland, OR 97215
Direct line (503) 449-3792
sblack at xerces.org

/The Xerces Society is an international, nonprofit organization that 
protects wildlife through the conservation of invertebrates and their 
habitat.
/ 
To join the Society, make a contribution, or read about our work,
please visit www.xerces.org <http://www.xerces.org/>.




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-- 
___________________________________________
*The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation*

The Xerces Society is an international, nonprofit
organization that protects wildlife through the
conservation of invertebrates and their habitat.
To join the Society, make a contribution, or read
about our work, please visit www.xerces.org

Sarina Jepsen
Endangered Species Program Director
4828 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Portland, OR 97215
tel: 503-232-6639 fax: 503-233-6794
email: sarina at xerces.org
___________________________________________
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