Bolivian Couple Works to Save Honeybees' Shrinking Habitats
January 24, 2021 06:54 PM
Honeybees in Bolivia’s mountains are in trouble. Their natural habitat is disappearing, being replaced by an environment they cannot call home. One couple in one of the country's forest regions is fighting to save them. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi reports.
- video at link -
https://www.voanews.com/episode/bolivian-couple-works-save-honeybees-shrinking-habitats-4557801
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This photo shows a giant Patagonian bumblebee (Bombus dahlbomii). Four decades ago, these bees were
abundant in Chile and Argentina, but now they have become an uncommon sight.
CREDIT: Eduardo E. Zattara
Quarter Of Known Bee Species Haven’t Appeared In Public Records Since 1990s
January 25, 2021 Eurasia Review
By Eurasia Review
Researchers at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) in Argentina have found that, since the 1990s, up to 25% of reported bee species are no longer being reported in global records, despite a large increase in the number of records available. While this does not mean that these species are all extinct, it might indicate that these species have become rare enough that no one is observing them in nature. The findings appear in the journal One Earth.
“With citizen science and the ability to share data, records are going up exponentially, but the number of species reported in these records is going down,” says first author Eduardo Zattara (@ezattara), a biologist at the Pollination Ecology Group from the Institute for Research on Biodiversity and the Environment (CONICET-Universidad Nacional del Comahue). “It’s not a bee cataclysm yet, but what we can say is that wild bees are not exactly thriving.”
While there are many studies about declining bee populations, these are usually focused on a specific area or a specific type of bee. These researchers were interested in identifying more general, global trends in bee diversity.
“Figuring out which species are living where and how each population is doing using complex aggregated datasets can be very messy,” says Zattara. “We wanted to ask a simpler question: what species have been recorded, anywhere in the world, in a given period?”
More:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/25012021-quarter-of-known-bee-species-havent-appeared-in-public-records-since-1990s/
