Collectors find plenty of bees but far fewer species than in the 1950s
Far fewer bee species are buzzing across Earth today, following a steep decline in bee diversity during the last three decades, according to an analysis of bee collections and observations going back a century. About half as many bee species are turning up in current collecting efforts for museums and other collections compared with in the 1950s, when surveys counted around 1,900 species a year, scientists report December 10 at bioRxiv.org. That high diversity in collections endured for several decades, but then began to plummet around the 1990s, likely reflecting a real drop in global bee diversity, according to the study, which is under peer review. “This is the first study suggesting that bee decline is a global process, and that the most significant changes have occurred in recent years,” says Margarita López-Uribe, a bee evolutionary ecologist at Penn State who was not part of the new research. The new work evaluates...