University of Virginia researchers discover rare bee

The species was located in Delaplane, Virginia.

Published October 21, 2014

From the Daily Progress:

Flitting from flower to flower, sipping nectar and wearing pollen on their fuzzy legs, rusty patched bumblebees were once a common sight all over the eastern United States. In recent years, however, the bee has all but disappeared and experts fear the pollinator may be headed toward extinction.

This summer, though, a research team led by a University of Virginia professor and members of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute spotted a rusty patched bumble bee at Sky Meadows State Park in Delaplane. The team found one worker bee from the rusty patched species, out of the nearly 35,000 bees belonging to 126 individual species collected and examined for the study, but its identification raises the possibility that the rare species may still be around.

The species is recognizable by the worker bees that have a rust-colored patch on the middle of their second abdominal segment. Once found throughout the east and upper Midwest of the U.S., the bee’s population has been in decline since the 1980s and is now estimated to have disappeared from 87 percent of that territory.

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