California Coast & Ocean

Gordon Frankie, a professor in U.C. Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources, is pursuing similar goals. He has recorded 82 species of native bees in the city of Berkeley, and has attracted at least 40 to the research garden he and his students planted. Frankie also surveys bee populations in other urban areas around the state, including Ukiah, Sacramento, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Pasadena, where he counts the frequency of bee visits and evaluates the bee-attracting potential of various plants people choose for their gardens. “We’ve found that the same plants seem to attract the same bees all over the state,” he said.

Using this information, Frankie and his collaborators have been giving presentations at schools and museums about how to plant bee-friendly gardens, and are developing a website with extensive resources. He’s also working with Robbin Thorp and botanist Barbara Ertter on a book on gardening for bees for the natural history series of University of California Press.

Taking Bees Seriously
Meanwhile, both the Xerces Society and the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign are helping to translate researchers’ findings into user-friendly informational publications. Xerces has put out a series of fact sheets and booklets on pollinator-friendly practices for farmers, gardeners, and park and golf course managers, and produced the Pollinator Conservation Handbook. The Pollinator Protection Campaign is producing bioregional planting guides aimed at a variety of readers, with specific plant lists for 13 regions of the United States.

Both organizations also collect pollinator data from researchers and other sources--a critical task in an area where little data has been compiled. The NRC’s Committee on the Status of Pollinators found what its chair, May Berenbaum, described as an “extraordinary paucity” of information on pollinator populations--even honeybees, despite their importance to agriculture. European nations have much better information than the United States on historic populations of native bees, said Laurie Davies Adams of the Pollinator Protection Campaign, because they “have had an army of citizen naturalists since Victorian times. We didn’t have that, so it’s going to be very hard for us to know what’s been lost here.” The NRC report was a first step toward addressing this lack. It is “a baseline assessment of what we don’t know as well as what we do know,” said Adams.

“We don’t have all of the facts to really know what is happening to the majority of native bees in the United States,” agreed Xerces’ executive director Scott Hoffman Black. “But there’s more information than you’d think. For our Red List [of endangered pollinators] we reached out to scientists who work on bees and found that many of them have lots of data that just isn’t getting out there.”

Many others are also sounding the alarm about the need for better and more research. At a hearing before a subcommittee of the House Agricultural Committee in March 2007, Berenbaum joined other scientists, farmers, beekeepers, and conservationists in urging Congress to fund more research and conservation for both managed and wild bees. The 2002 Farm Bill will expire in September 2007, providing Congress the opportunity to make pollinator needs a high priority in the new legislation.

The attention now being paid to the problems of bees may be the proverbial silver lining to CCD’s storm cloud. Bees have been having a hard time of late, but it seems that a lot of people are going to bat for them now. “The good news is that people are really taking this seriously,” said Adams. “It’s long overdue.” Said Black: “People are finally getting it, that this is important.”