Unregulated bumblebee trade threatens bumblebees

http://grist.org/news/unregulated-bumblebee-trade-threatens-bumblebees/

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Though they’re bigger, bumblebees tend to get overshadowed by European honeybees. We’ve all heard that honeybee colonies are collapsing, but did you know that the bumblebees that been have been pollinating America’s native plants for millennia are also disappearing?

The U.S. government, though, treats them with equal disdain. It is not taking decisive steps to protect honeybees, and no one’s yet been able to sting it into action to protect the bumbling variety either.

Still, activists keep trying. On Tuesday, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation wrote to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, urging the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to regulate commercial trade in bumblebees.


Commercial operations box up bumblebees and ship them around the country, generally to pollinate crops grown in greenhouses. That trade is transmitting deadly diseases and parasites to wild populations, the enviros charge, and the release of aggressive Eastern species of bumblebees in Western states is hurting populations of the chilled-out Western varieties.