Feds to protect rare bumblebee last seen over a decade ago

Officials for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Monday they will be putting the Franklin’s bumblebee, a rare insect not spotted since 2006, on the list of federally endangered species.

The decision, announced in a 62-page agency action, comes months after conservationists sued the federal government for failing to protect the rare species under regulations put in place by the Trump administration in 2019.

Franklin’s bumblebee has been on environmentalists’ radars ever since it became clear to the scientific community that the bee species was struggling to stay afloat after facing numerous threats to their habitats, including evolving pathogens and pesticides. The species has reportedly become so rare that confirmed sightings of them have largely been exclusive to southern Oregon and northern California; the last sighting was in 2006, when a lone bee was spotted in Oregon.

Despite seemingly vanishing from the map for over a decade, the Center for Biological Diversity took the federal government to court failing to protect Franklin’s bumblebees and over Trump administration regulations that drastically limited critical habitat designations for certain species.

But this week, the feds reversed course and announced that Franklin’s bumblebee will be listed as endangered under the federal register of endangered species.

In its report, the Fish and Wildlife Service said that even though the bees have not been sighted in 15 years, there is not enough survey data from the bees’ historical homes to definitively declare them extinct. Some wild populations may still exist.

“Even though none have been seen since 2006, Franklin’s bumblebee populations could potentially persist undetected,” reads the report.

The service stopped short, however, of designating a critical habitat for Franklin’s bumblebee. The report indicates that the bee species forages, breeds and shelters in a variety of habitats and notes that a more specific habitat study for them has not been completed yet.

Quinn Read, Oregon policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity, says that while Monday’s action was a step in the right direction, there remains work to be done.

“Franklin’s bumblebee is one of the rarest in the world, and it will surely tumble into extinction without Endangered Species Act protections,” Read said in a statement. “This is a good step for these bumblebees, but the federal failure to protect critical habitat will make recovery an uphill battle. There’s just no way to save species like this unique bumblebee without protecting the places they live.”

For those skeptical that that the bee species could still be alive today after roughly 15 years of radio silence, endangered species have reappeared after this long of an absence — after much longer absences, in fact.

In 1989, humans found surviving Fender’s blue butterfly specimens in Oregon; the species had been believed to be extinct for 52 years. The species was later added to the list of endangered species in 2000 and recovery efforts have proven successful. The largest known colony of Fender’s blue butterfly is found at the Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge in Polk County, Oregon.

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