In 2021, scientists in Guelph, Ontario got down to accomplish one thing that had by no means been completed earlier than: open a lab particularly designed for elevating bumble bees in captivity.
Now, three years later, the scientists on the Bumble Bee Conservation Lab are celebrating an enormous milestone. Over the course of 2024, they efficiently pulled off what was as soon as deemed inconceivable and raised a technology of yellow-banded bumble bees.
The Bumble Bee Conservation Lab, which operates beneath the nonprofit Wildlife Preservation Canada, is the fruits of a decade-long mission to save lots of the bee species, which is listed as endangered beneath the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.
“WPC started working with endangered bumble bees in 2013,” Lance Woolaver, govt director of Wildlife Preservation Canada, instructed Cottage Life. “As such, we now have extra expertise working with bumble bee conservation than most different organizations in Canada.”
Though the efforts have been in movement for over a decade, the lab itself is a latest growth that has quickly accelerated conservation efforts.
For bee scientists, the urgency was needed.
“We might see the main declines taking place quickly in Canada’s native bumble bees and knew we needed to act, not simply discuss the issue, however do one thing sensible and fast,” Woolaver stated.
Yellow-banded bumble bees, which reside in southern Canada and throughout an enormous swatch of the US, had been as soon as a typical species.
Nevertheless, like many different bee species, their populations declined sharply within the mid-Nineteen Nineties from a litany of threats, together with pathogens, pesticides, and dramatic habitat loss.
Because the flip of the century, scientists have plunged in to present bees a serving to hand. Nevertheless it was solely within the final decade that Woolaver and his workforce “recognized a serious hole” in bumble bee conservation and got down to resolve it.
“Nobody knew the right way to breed threatened species in captivity,” he defined. “That is critically essential if assurance populations are wanted to maintain a species from going extinct and to help with future reintroductions.”
To start out their experiment, scientists hand-selected wild queen bees all through Ontario and introduced them to the temperature-controlled lab, the place they had been “handled like queens” and fed tiny balls of nectar and pollen.
Then, with the assistance of Ontario’s African Lion Safari theme park, the queens had been introduced out to small, outside enclosures and paired with different bees with the hope that mating would happen.
For some pairs, they needed to mess around with totally different environments to “set the temper,” swapping out spacious flight cages for cozier colony bins.
And it labored.
“The 2 greatest success tales of 2024 had been that we efficiently bred our focal species, yellow-banded bumble bees, by means of their whole lifecycle for the primary time,” Woolaver stated.
“[And] the primary profitable overwintering of yellow-banded bumble bees final winter allowed us to determine our first lab technology, doubling our mating successes and considerably rising the variety of younger queens for overwintering to wake early spring and begin their very own colonies for future generations and future reintroductions.”
Though the first-of-its-kind experiment required cautious planning, consideration, sources, and a decade of analysis, Woolaver hopes that their efforts encourage others to assist bees in backyards throughout North America.
“Bear in mind that our native bumble bees actually are in critical decline,” Woolaver famous, “so when cottagers see bumble bees pollinating vegetation of their gardens, they are surely seeing one thing particular.”
Header photographs courtesy of Tiffani Harrison and E. Richard/Wildlife Preservation Canada
