I spy a bumble bee!
, which kicked off Saturday and runs through Aug. 1. The crowd-sourced data gathered during the backyard count will be used to document bumble bee occurrence and abundance.
By Monday morning, the count had notched nearly 4,400 observations. While the common eastern bumble bee accounted for roughly one-third of the early tally, plenty of bees with less familiar names have been spotted as well, including the golden northern bumble bee and the lemon cuckoo bumble bee , visiting a church garden in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, and an American bumble bee , spied in the greater Houston metropolitan region.
Both the rusty patched and American bumble bees have suffered precipitous population declines. In 2017, the rusty patched was the first bumble bee ever placed on the U.S. Endangered Species list and an application to add the American bumble bee isThe rusty patched is at the center of an ongoing fight to save ancient Bell Bowl Prairie in Rockford.