Preserve Staff Find Endangered Bee Not Seen In Preserves Since 1983

WILL COUNTY, IL — A rusty-patched bumblebee, a federally endangered species that had not been observed in Will County preserves since 1983, was discovered this summer in the Des Plaines River Valley, the preserve said in a release.

“I almost started crying,” said Barbara Sherwood, a restoration ecologist for the Forest Preserve District, who had vowed earlier this year she would try to find the bee as part of a bumblebee monitoring program she joined.

“I was kind of shaking,” she said of her find. “As soon as I saw it, I beelined over to it and started taking video. And then I took some still photos. The bumblebee didn’t fly off because it was so focused on what it was doing. It went from one flower to the next and just kept going.”

Bombus affinis, commonly known as the rusty-patched bumblebee, once inhabited a vast range of eastern and midwestern states and southern Canada, but it has experienced serious decline, according to the preserve.

The rusty-patched bee is endangered because of habitat loss, the use of pesticides, pathogens from non-native bees and climate change. Not only is the bee state and federally endangered, it’s listed globally as critically endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, the preserve said.

Seeing a rare species in a preserve that has been managed for years by Forest Preserve staff makes all the hard work worthwhile, Sherwood added. The land where the bumblebee was found has undergone invasive species removal, prescribed burning and reseeding.

“We do this job because we believe in what we’re doing, the conservation of nature,” she said. “A lot of the work we do is incredibly strenuous, and you’re often in uncomfortable situations with heat and insects. So, it makes you feel like it’s worth it. What we’re doing is providing the habitat they need.”

Sherwood’s quest to find the rusty-patched bumblebee started when she learned of a monitoring program established by U.S. Geological Survey. She joined it and followed the protocol for searching and detecting bumblebees in general and the rusty-patched bumblebee specifically.

She decided to search an area that would be an inviting habitat for bumblebees, the preserve said.

“You have to have prairie with a lot of floral resources that is adjacent to woods, because that is where the queen overwinters,” she explained.

On Sherwood’s first foray, she discovered other bumblebee species but no rusty-patched bee.

“The most likely bumblebees people encounter are the Eastern common bumblebee, brown-belted bumblebee, two-spotted bumblebee and black-and-gold bumblebee,” she said.

According to the bumblebee monitoring protocol, she could visit a preserve for two 30-minute sessions. At minute 21 of her second session, she saw it. And, because she had seen them in person three times before at a previous job and had studied their traits, she knew immediately it was a rusty-patched bumblebee, the preserve said.

“I’m to the point now, from a distance I can identify a brown-belted, which is a very common bumblebee, just by the hairs on the thorax. It looks like it's clean cut. Whereas a rusty-patched is a little scraggly and tousled, like she just woke up.”

Additional bumblebee species are in jeopardy, too, because of the same issues that have affected rusty-patched bumblebees, Sherwood added.

“All bumblebees are potentially at risk from the same things that caused the decline of the rusty-patched,” she said. “We have other bumblebees in our preserves – the Southern plains bumblebee and the American bumblebee – that have been petitioned with U.S. Fish and Wildlife to possibly get listed as federally endangered.”

After Sherwood found one rusty-patched bumblebee in July, another Forest Preserve staffer found two more rusty-patched bumblebees in a nearby preserve a few weeks later by following Sherwood's guidance and looking in a large patch of bergamot.

“So, we have three documented sightings this summer,” Sherwood said in a release.