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Here a Bee, There a Bee, Everywhere a Wild Bee
Biologists are finding new bee species all over the Pacific Northwest—highlighting how little we know about native pollinators.
After following a trail under hydroelectric lines and through Douglas fir forest, Rowan Rampton, then a graduate student in biology at the University of Calgary, emerges in a scrubby high-elevation grassland outside Castlegar in the west Kootenay mountains of British Columbia. Perhaps eclipsed by the general public’s familiarity with the non-native European honeybees that are deployed in North American agriculture and honey production, their wild, endemic counterparts face huge gaps in knowledge, with some very basic questions unanswered: what native bee species live here, how they are doing, what floral and habitat resources they require to survive. Despite the elemental role pollinators play in global food production and ecosystem functioning writ large, evidence is mounting that the six-legged foundation that so many plants and the rest of us larger creatures rely on is beginning to crumble.
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