First bee species is placed on nation’s endangered list

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — The rusty patched bumblebee has become the first bee species in the continental U.S. to be declared endangered after suffering a dramatic population loss over the past 20 years, federal officials said Tuesday.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to add the bee to the endangered list means there will be a recovery plan to encourage people to provide more habitat and reduce pesticide usage — many steps that could help other struggling bees and monarch butterflies, which pollinate a wide variety of plants, officials said.

“Pollinators are small but mighty parts of the natural mechanism that sustains us and our world,” said Tom Melius, the service’s Midwest regional director. “Without them, our forests, parks, meadows and shrublands, and the abundant, vibrant life they support, cannot survive.”

The decision drew praise from environmentalists but criticism from the nonprofit American Farm Bureau Federation, which acknowledged the role bees play in pollinating crops but contended the listing could lead to costly regulation of land or chemical use.

“I think we can do better in the private sector, where landowners working collaboratively can come up with protection for these species without intervention and bureaucratic red tape of the federal government,” said Ryan Yates, the group’s director of congressional relations.

The Endangered Species Act prohibits significant modification or degradation of habitat that leads directly to death or injury of listed species. The Fish and Wildlife Service said it hadn’t yet developed a strategy for dealing with private landowners regarding the rusty patched bumblebee, which it said already has disappeared from large-scale farms.

Bees and other insects provide billions of dollars’ worth of pollination each year, benefiting crops such as tomatoes, cranberries and peppers. Even plants that can pollinate on their own generate bigger fruit when bumblebees do the job instead.