This played on Maine Public radio this week. Something for all of us to consider, another great reason to grow a garden and to add native plants to your landscape. As our human footprint continues to increase, creating habitat for declining species is the least we could do.
Please listen….not only a warning about the Rusty Patched Bumble Bee being put on the endangered species list but some curious facts about this amazing little bee!
I apologize for the possible broadcasts you may hear after the piece on the bumblebee, not sure how to edit the recording!
http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/01/13/rusty-patched-bumblebee
Fernwood Nursery & Gardens 
I read about this earlier in the week. Very sad indeed. The video at the end or your link is impressive but also disturbing. How can we survive without these buzz pollinators?!
Let’s hope the decline can be addressed by improving and saving habitat. For so many of the pollinators, the use of pesticides and GMO coated seeds ( neonicotinoids) are what’s responsible for their death. Are there many bees on the island? What kind of pollinators do you see most?
Tragic to think we (humans) are tampering with this vital element of the natural world!
There are far fewer bees and butterflies here over the last ten years that’s for sure. We’ve started growing more bee loving flowering plants to encourage and help their survival but sadly, spraying has become more widespread in fields rather than clearing by hand as was done prior. Just next door to us we see them spraying a couple times a year, then they graze cattle and horses there. Makes no sense and is so frustrating but there’s nothing we can do. Courses are even offered regularly here to obtain licenses and to learn to spray ‘safely’. Should see them, with breathing masks and full body suits on. Several bee keepers have lost their entire hives and put it down to the spraying.
A real disconnect, yes? You begin to wonder, do these people like to eat? Do they see the correlation between our food systems and the health (or lack there of), of our natural world? Evidence says no, I guess. These are the things that weigh heavy on my heart, make me weep , really. I worry about the future generations , all the disregard that will leave them with so many systems out of whack. Well, let’s do our part!! plant gardens, plant forests, plant meadows!!!I am too stubborn not to.
And I wonder the same, have they no regard for their own children and grandchildren? Makes me furious how careless they are with the island–we could really be sheltered from such things and live in healthy abundance, completely self-sustaining if they would just cop on and become cooperative instead of self-serving. I agree that we ought to teach by example in hopes to educate not alienate and further fracture communities. On a more positive note, more people are gardening and keeping animals, so perhaps things will turn around before it’s too late.