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    Where Have All the Bees Gone?: Pollinators in Crisis
    Where Have All the Bees Gone?: Pollinators in Crisis
    Where Have All the Bees Gone?: Pollinators in Crisis
    Ebook134 pages2 hours

    Where Have All the Bees Gone?: Pollinators in Crisis

    By Rebecca E. Hirsch

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    About this ebook

    Apples, blueberries, peppers, cucumbers, coffee, and vanilla. Do you like to eat and drink? Then you might want to thank a bee.

    Bees pollinate 75 percent of the fruits, vegetables, and nuts grown in the United States. Around the world, bees pollinate $24 billion worth of crops each year. Without bees, humans would face a drastically reduced diet. We need bees to grow the foods that keep us healthy.

    But numbers of bees are falling, and that has scientists alarmed. What's causing the decline? Diseases, pesticides, climate change, and loss of habitat are all threatening bee populations. Some bee species teeter on the brink of extinction. Learn about the many bee species on Earth—their nests, their colonies, their life cycles, and their vital connection to flowering plants. Most importantly, find out how you can help these important pollinators.

    "If we had to try and do what bees do on a daily basis, if we had to come out here and hand pollinate all of our native plants and our agricultural plants, there is physically no way we could do it. . . . Our best bet is to conserve our native bees." —ecologist Rebecca Irwin, North Carolina State University

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLerner Publishing
    Release dateFeb 4, 2020
    ISBN9781541595934
    Where Have All the Bees Gone?: Pollinators in Crisis
    Author

    Rebecca E. Hirsch

    Rebecca E. Hirsch is an award- winning children's author with a PhD in plant biology. Her picture books include Plants Can't Sit Still and Night Creatures: Animals That Swoop, Crawl, and Creep while You Sleep. She lives with her husband and three children in State College, Pennsylvania. You can visit her online at rebeccahirsch.com.

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      Book preview

      Where Have All the Bees Gone? - Rebecca E. Hirsch

      cover.jpgTitlePage.jpg

      To the bees, with thanks for all you do —R.H.

      Copyright © 2020 by Rebecca E. Hirsch

      All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

      Twenty-First Century Books

      An imprint of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

      241 First Avenue North

      Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA

      For reading levels and more information, look up this title at www.lernerbooks.com.

      Main body text set in ITC Caslon 224 Std Book.

      Typeface provided by Adobe Systems.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Hirsch, Rebecca E., author.

      Title: Where have all the bees gone? : pollinators in crisis / by Rebecca E. Hirsch.

      Description: Minneapolis : Twenty-First Century Books, [2020] | Audience: Age 13–18. | Audience: Grade 9 to 12. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | 

      Identifiers: LCCN 2019020684 (print) | LCCN 2019021603 (ebook) | ISBN 9781541583856 (eb pdf) | ISBN 9781541534636 (lb : alk. paper)

      Subjects: LCSH: Bees—Conservation—Juvenile literature. | Insect pollinators—Conservation—Juvenile literature. | Pollination by bees—Juvenile literature.

      Classification: LCC QL568.A6 (ebook) | LCC QL568.A6 H485 2020 (print) | DDC 595.79/9—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020684

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      1-44880-35729-8/7/2019

      Contents

      1

      The Last Franklin’s Bumblebee

      2

      An Ancient Relationship

      3

      Pollination Powerhouses

      4

      A Bee Cs

      5

      Disease Spillover

      6

      The Day the Bees Died

      7

      Bee Town, USA

      8

      What’s Best for Bees?

      A Note from the Author

      Glossary

      Source Notes

      Selected Bibliography

      Further Information

      Index

      1

      The Last Franklin’s Bumblebee

      People often ask the value of Franklin’s bumblebee. In terms of a direct contribution to the grand scale of human economies, perhaps not much, but no one has measured its contribution in those terms. However, in the grand scheme of our planet and its environmental values, I would say it is priceless.

      —Robbin Thorp, entomologist

      Robbin Thorp, wearing a bright yellow T-shirt with a bumblebee printed across the front, drives his white truck along a road on Mount Ashland in southern Oregon. He steers past the base of a ski lift and rolls to a stop beside an alpine meadow. He cuts the engine and steps out into the sunshine.

      Under a sky of blue streaked white with clouds, the meadow blazes with pink and yellow flowers. But Thorp focuses on something other than the fine weather and quiet scenery. He is on a quest.

      Thorp is a retired entomologist (a scientist who studies insects). He is searching for the bee pictured on his shirt: Franklin’s bumblebee. It looks much like any other of North America’s forty-six species of bumblebee—big, fat, and fuzzy. Unlike other bumblebees, it has a round, black face and a U-shaped marking on its back, right between the wings.

      As far as bumblebees go, Franklin’s isn’t remarkable, except for one thing: it has gone missing. Once common in alpine meadows like this one, the bee seems to have vanished. Thorp hasn’t seen one in ten years.

      Slowly, Thorp walks from flower to flower, shoes crunching on the craggy ground. In one hand, he holds a white net and in the other, a device like a squirt gun. But this device doesn’t shoot water. It slurps bees.

      As he walks, he peers at each clump of flowers and inspects the bees that are busily looking for food there. When he sees a bee that deserves a closer look, he pauses, leans forward, raises the bee vacuum, and takes aim.

      ZEEEEEOOOP!

      He studies the imprisoned creature through a magnifying lens built into the vacuum. He looks for the telltale markings. Is it that bee—the one on his shirt? The one he seeks? Is it a Franklin’s?

      Again and again, with each bee he finds, the answer is no. What has happened to Franklin’s bumblebee?

      A bee flies through a meadow, looking for the nectar it needs to survive.

      Disappearing Bees

      The story of the disappearance of Franklin’s bumblebee begins in the 1990s. That’s when US Forest Service officials approached Thorp, who was then a professor at the University of California–Davis, and asked him to monitor the species. At the time, Bombus franklini (the bee’s scientific name) had the smallest geographic range of any of the world’s 250 species of bumblebees. The rare bee lived only in southern Oregon and Northern California, between the Cascade Range and the Pacific Ocean. Its entire range could fit inside an oval just 200 miles (322 km) north to south and 70 miles (113 km) east to west.

      What’s in a Name?

      All plants and animals have common names, such as the Shasta daisy and the peregrine falcon. Biologists also use a scientific naming system created by Swedish scientist Carolus Linnaeus in the mid-eighteenth century. The system uses Latin-based terms to identify each plant or animal’s genus (group) and species (specific kind within that group). For example, all bumblebees belong to the same genus, Bombus, so all share that first name. Each species within Bombus has a distinct second name. Franklin’s bumblebee is called Bombus franklini, while the western bumblebee is Bombus occidentalis.

      Genus and species are the most precise classifications for living things. But these categories fall under a larger naming umbrella of eight levels: domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. You can see the hierarchy by looking at Franklin’s bumblebee. It belongs to the domain Eukarya, a group that includes all plants and animals. Within that category, Franklin’s bumblebee belongs to the kingdom Animalia (the animal kingdom), the phylum Arthropoda (animals with jointed legs and no backbones), the class Insecta (insects), the order Hymenoptera (a group of insects including ants, wasps, and bees), the family Apidae (bees), and the genus Bombus (bumblebees). The species name Bombus franklini is the designation for Franklin’s bumblebee. Each kind of living thing has its own species name, and members of the same species can mate with one another.

      Because the chubby bee with the round black face and the U on its back was so rare, Forest Service officials wondered whether it should be listed as endangered. An endangered species is one at risk of going extinct, or completely disappearing from Earth.

      The US Endangered Species Act of 1973 protects animals and plants in the United States that are in danger of becoming extinct. When the US government adds a species to the endangered species list, federal agencies must conserve and protect the species and its habitat—the environment in which the plant or animal normally lives. Agencies must prohibit actions that would harm the species, such as hunting it or destroying forests. The act has saved several animals from

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