#RUSTYPATCHED Bumble bee
The rusty patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis) is an eastern bee whose workers have a small rust-colored patch on the middle of their second abdominal segment. This bee was once commonly distributed throughout the east and upper Midwest of the United States, but has declined from an estimated 87% of its historic range in recent years. The rusty-patched bumble bee is an excellent pollinator of wildflowers, cranberries, and other important crops, including plum, apple, alfalfa and onion seed.
In January of 2013, the Xerces Society and partners filed a petition to list the rusty patched bumble bee as an endangered species under the US Endangered Species Act. Read more.
Commercial bumble bee rearing may be the greatest threat to Bombus affinis. In North America, two bumble bee species have been commercially reared for pollination of greenhouse tomatoes and other crops: B. occidentalis and B. impatiens. Between 1992 and 1994, queens of B. occidentalis and B. impatiens were shipped to European rearing facilities, where colonies were produced then shipped back to the U.S. for commercial pollination. Bumble bee expert Robbin Thorp has hypothesized that these bumble bee colonies acquired a disease (probably a virulent strain of the microsporidian Nosema bombi) from a European bee that was in the same rearing facility, the Buff-tailed Bumble Bee (Bombus terrestris). The North American bumble bees would have had no prior resistance to this pathogen. Dr. Thorp hypothesizes that the disease then spread to wild populations of B. occidentalis and B. franklini in the West (from exposure to infected populations of commercially reared B. occidentalis), and B. affinis and B. terricola in the East (from exposure to commercially reared B. impatiens). In the late 1990’s, biologists began to notice that B. affinis, B. occidentalis, B. terricola, and B. franklini were severely declining.
Where these bees were once very common, they were nearly impossible to find. B. impatiens has not shown a dramatic decline; Robbin Thorp hypothesizes that B. impatiens may serve as a carrier of an exotic strain ofNosema bombi, although it may not be as severely affected by the disease as B. affinis, B. occidentalis, B. terricola, and B. franklini. B. affinis, B. occidentalis, B. terricola, and B. franklini are closely related to each other (they all belong to the subgenus Bombus sensu stricto). B. impatiens is not as closely related, which may explain the difference in sensitivity to a pathogen. This hypothesis is still in need of validation, although the timing, speed, and severity of the population crashes strongly supports the idea that an introduced disease caused the decline of bees.