Protecting the Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bee
The Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bee
The Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bee is pretty much exactly what you picture when you envision a
bee in a garden, they have alternating black and white stripes and a fluffy little body that looks like it
would be too big for its thin wings to carry. The Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bee enhabits areas in the northwestern continental united states and up into parts of western Canada and Alaska, it could previously be found in the midwest and northeast of the united states but has become extinct in those areas due to a multitude of different threats. These bees have lost the ability to build traditional bee hives with other members of their species, they do not collect pollen or feed their young, instead, they find already constructed and thriving bee hives and force the members of the other bee species to feed and raise their young. Once old enough to leave the nest of the other bee species the adult Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bees will eat directly from flowers and find a new bee hive to infiltrate. The Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bee can expect to live for about a year if it manages to avoid predators live wasps, hornets, birds, and even some larger mammals like badgers, raccoons, and sometimes bears. As of 2014, there were around 75,000 Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bees, however, this number is and has been rapidly decreasing.
https://explorer.natureserve.org/Taxon/ELEMENT_GLOBAL.2.819661/Bombus_suckleyi
A bumble bee on a Dandelion by Walter Baxter
Where do they live?
The Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bee lives in forest, shrubland, and grassland biomes. As this species is completely reliant on living in the hives of other bees they have a harder time surviving in areas where different bee species are not as common. The biomes the Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bee can live in are most commonly found in the northwest regions of North America, northeastern Asia, and central and western Europe. However, these bees are currently only found inhabiting North America. The key features of the biomes in the Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bee lives are occasional rain, high biodiversity in plants and animals, rich soil, variation in temperature, and variation in seasons. The primary producers in the areas where the Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bee lives are several different tree species such as firs, cedars, maples hemlocks, spruce, dogwoods, various species of mosses, vines, and grass as well as a few different kinds of shrubs and small bushes. The primary consumers in temperate forests, grasslands, and shrublands include small mammals like squirrels, mice, chipmunks, and prerriedogs, as well as larger mammals like dear, elk, bison, and pronghorn, the primary consumers also include numerous insect species including different kinds of bumble bees the Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bee can live off of. Secondary consumers living in temperate forests, grasslands, and shrublands are different bird species like owls and falcons, and mammals like weasels, raccoons, badgers, and possums. The animals at the top of the food chain in biomes the Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bee inhabits include wolves, lynxes, cougars, bears, and the occasional mountain lion.https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/44937699/46440241
http://naturemappingfoundation.org/natmap/facts/badger_k6.html
An ancient Douglas-fir Pseudotsuga menziesii in mixed Douglas-fir-Western Hemlock Tsuga heterophylla forest, Alberni, British Columbia, by Scott Darbey
.jpg){kind=link}
Threats to the Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bee
Threats to the Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bee include Residential & commercial development, Agriculture & aquaculture, Annual & perennial non-timber crops, Livestock farming & ranching, Natural system modifications, forest fires & fire, suppression, Pollution, Agricultural & forestry effluents, Climate change & severe weather, Habitat shifting & alteration, Droughts, Temperature extremes, Storms & flooding. There are many threats to the Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bee all of which are extremely important t address and try to solve, the threat that I will be focusing on is habitat loss due to agricultural development. This is an important threat to focus on because the continuous development of wild land to be used as agricultural space not only affects the Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bee but countless other species of plants and animals as well. Agriculture is a particularly prevalent issue today because according to foodprint.org once land has been scraped clean of any and all native species it is heavily treated with chemicals and pesticides, the soil is completely depleted of its nutrients by a lack of biodiversity and causing significant erosion to occur. Once land has been taken and used to farm crops it is almost impossible for the soil and ecosystem to ever return to the way they once existed. Some ways this kind of mistreatment of the land affects the Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bee are, there are no native flowers for them to feed on, they can become poisoned by the pesticides, and most importantly, there is nowhere for other bee species to build hives for them to place their young in. without the help of other species of bees the Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bee has no way of raising or feeding their offspring, this causes significant harm to their population and makes it almost impossible for the species to thrive.
Solutions
One thing people living in Keene could do to help prevent large farms from developing more land would be to be more mindful of where their food is coming from and try to buy more local foods. According to gogreen.org buying foods from small local farmers and businesses is better for the environment because it protects local wildlife and reduces the amount of waste that goes into producing packing, and shipping foods. The solution to overusing land for the sake of agricultural development is a tricky thing to tackle, I believe the most effective way to prevent more unnecessary land use would be to change the way we think about the food we grow in us and start to shift our diets to feature more variety of native plants and less genetically modified crops and factory farmed meets. Obviously, this is not very realistic and would be a very hard sell to most people living in the United States, so my second idea for preventing more land from being taken from native species like the Suckly Cuckoo Bumble Bee would be for the government to place restrictions on how much land farms can legally develop and provide companies with knowledge on the biomes they plan to develop in homes that they are more mindful on what they are taking.
http://www.gogreen.org/blog/the-environmental-benefits-of-buying-locally
Comments
Post a Comment