Rusty Patched Bumble Bee. Photo courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service; Kim Mitchell
A recent paper in Science Magazine documented the loss of bumble bee species over the past century in North America and Europe, and predicts further losses to climate change in the future. Bumble bees are important pollinators for a variety of domesticated and wild plants. They were already depleted by habitat fragmentation, industrial agriculture, and pesticides, but we now know that climate change will further threaten them. Many bumble bee species possess qualities that suggest they would become even more important pollinators as human-caused environmental pressures impacted other pollinating species. Bumble bees can fly longer distances than many other pollinators and so reach nectar and pollen-bearing plants even when there are large areas without flowering plants - as may be the case with urbanization or crop monocultures. Many bumble bees are generalists and do not specialize on a certain flower or group of flowers, enabling them to persist when flowering plant species shift as a result of human development. The loss of bumble bee species is a major blow to our suite of native pollinators.
Bumble bees, though, are much more than their function as pollinators. They are remarkable animals in their own right. In another recent paper in Science, researchers found that bumble bees could transfer the memory of an object experienced with one sense, say visually, to another sense, such as touch. Even if they couldn’t see the object, they would recognize it by touch though they had only seen it previously. This ability to recognize an object perceived with one sense and then recognize it again with a different sense has been known only in vertebrates - mammals and one fish species. Scientists speculate that one way this may occur is through the formation of imagery in the brain. And this leads to the idea that bumble bee consciousness or awareness of the world might be more similar to human experience than we could have thought possible. As you begin to see bumble bees around flowers this spring and summer, don’t disturb them. They have a lot on their minds!