December 2024
A rusty patched bumble bee in Bath County, 2018. (Ellison Orcutt / Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation)
by Charlie Paullin, Virginia Mercury
The little bumblebee, considered a keystone species because of how it benefits the environment through pollination, could be getting some buzzworthy survival assistance along the Virginia and West Virginia state border.
On Nov. 25, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed designating about 1.6 million acres of land across the country as a critical habitat for the rusty patched bumblebee. The area includes 118,603 acres in Bath and Highland counties in Virginia, and Greenbrier and Pocahontas Counties in West Virginia.
Rich Hatfield, a senior conservation biologist in the endangered species program at the Xerces Society, said he’s “glad the service is using this tool,” though he has some questions over the effectiveness of the designation in urban areas in mid-western parts of the country.
“In Virginia these are the most isolated population of the rusty patched bumblebee that we know about,” Hatfield said. “Their contribution to the resilience (of the species) I don’t think can be overstated. Those populations are critically important.”
How we got here
The rusty patched bumblebee is the little black and yellow critter with a brown spot on its second abdominal segment, giving it its name, though the Queen bees are entirely yellow. The bees pollinate several plant species.
The bee was common throughout midwestern and northeastern parts of the U.S., and Canada, but since the 1990s it has lost about 90% of its range, or area in which it is found.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said evidence suggests the causes of the decline to be sickness and exposure to some pesticides, as well as habitat loss, small population changes and the effects of climate change.
In 2017, the agency added the bee to the Endangered Species Act, which requires federal agencies to determine if any permitted activity would adversely impact the species.
The bee disrupted the building of the since-canceled Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Judges in the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals yanked the permits for the project after determining the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had erred in saying it wouldn’t have a detrimental impact on the species’ survival.
In 2020, the Natural Resources Defense said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had erred again by failing to designate a critical habitat for the bee and saying such wouldn’t benefit the species. After settlements, the federal agency agreed to make a critical habitat designation by Nov. 20 of this year.
“This decision represents a vital step forward for one of America’s most endangered pollinators,” said Lucas Rhoads, senior attorney for pollinators and pesticides at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We cannot afford further delays in protecting high-quality habitat that can save the bee from extinction. We look forward to this proposal being finalized as soon as possible.”
The Virginia lands
According to the proposal, the bee’s protected habitat in West Virginia and Virginia consists of 11,200 acres of private lands, 1,845 acres of Virginia-owned lands, and 105,558 acres of federal lands.
The federally conserved lands include the Monongahela and George Washington and Jefferson National Forests. The entire 1.6 million acres overlap with habitats for other already-endangered species, USFWS said, meaning “little additional conservation effort is usually needed beyond what is already in place.”
Ellison Orcutt, the lead field zoologist for the Virginia Natural Heritage Program at the Department of Conservation and Recreation, said the proposed area in north Bath County is a known High Potential Zone, or HPZ. There, the cooler climate and lack of development from the federally protected forested land will likely make a favorable habitat for the bees, Orcutt said.
DCR’s Natural Heritage Program has been working to conserve the species after its first identification in the state since the 1990s came in 2014, along with several other insects and plants, Orcutt explained. That work includes the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources creating a Wildlife Management Area in neighboring Highland County, which now hosts native wildflowers the bees favor.
The proposal notes that the Appalachian region is home to a genetically diverse variation of the bee.
Though, without baseline genetic data, “it’s unclear if this distinct genetic group existed before (the bee’s) decline or if it’s emerged since 1990 or so after the decline,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director with the Center for Biological Diversity.
The diversity could be the result of gradual shifts in genetics from the east to the west, and the nearby bees in Indiana and Ohio are now gone, making the Virginia bees “more easily distinct,” Burd said. At the same time, the Virginia region could also be isolated from stressors, including competition with honey bees, allowing the rusty patched bumblebees to persist.
“This distinct genetic population is very critical to the future of the species,” Burd also said. “A lack of genetic diversity in the species likely made the species as a whole more susceptible to disease and other stressors. The remaining populations have persisted through the major decline in the species so they may be better able to survive into the future.”
Maintaining and spreading that critical diversity is why Hatfield said it’s important to expand protections to additional areas outside of those that have 50 or more known bee sightings. That would create corridors for the bees to migrate in and protect bees that may live in areas but aren’t documented.
“If we want the species to be able to repopulate its former range outside of areas protected as critical habitat, there needs to be corridors connecting currently unpopulated healthy habitat across the entire range,” Hatfield said.
The Virginia Mercury is an independent, nonprofit online news organization covering state government and policy. The Mercury is an affiliate of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization, supported by grants and donations.