Bees by the book. Can municipalities save the pollinators?
Rare bumblebee hasn’t been seen in New England for more almost two decades
The “rusty patched” bumblebee, Bombus affinis to bug nerds, hasn’t been seen buzzing around most of its native New England since 1999. It was last spotted on the East Coast in 2009, just south of Bangor, Maine.
And that’s bad news for the bug world and for humans, as this and other wild bees, such as the rusty patched type, which are about as long as a penny and have an orange band around their abdomens. They are crucial pollinators, helping to grow food for both people and wildlife.
“That’s the doom and gloom of it,” said Damon Hall, a Northeastern University associate professor who teaches environmental sciences and public policy. “The rusty patched is a bellwether for the insect world…All bumblebees, sweat bees, orchard bees, are in trouble. All studies show wild bees are declining. If we save one, we can bring more back with it.”
So, Hall launched a new research project in January, with one question – can cities and towns help save the rusty patched bee?
The project will explore whether getting municipalities to plant more dandelions and other wildflowers, cut back on mowing highway medians and even getting businesses to plant flowers and grass atop their buildings will revive the population of the bees.
Phase one of the project is to create a national database of what cities and towns are doing to save the pollinators.
To that end, he and three of his students are combing through municipal policies, ordinances, action plans, budgets, public outreach for anything bug-friendly in about 2,500 municipalities across the six New England states and New York, which is also part of its range.
He’s working with Madison Farmer, a second-year graduate student in environmental science and policy, along with undergraduate environmental sciences undergraduate students Madison Oxnard and Ella Froah. They’re funded by a grant from the Sarah K. deCoizart Perpetual Trust, a trust that supports conservation efforts and also some computer-search assistance from SerpAPI.
So far, they’ve found that municipalities such as Boston and Bangor are putting in rooftop hives on city owned property, enacting pesticide reductions, and making dedicated pollinator pathways.
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Somerville, Massachusetts created a pollinator action plan in 2024, asking residents to plant gardens and wildflowers and to use outdoor potted plants if they have limited space.
Louisa Oliveira, the director of Public Space and Urban Forestry for Somerville, said the idea is to give homeowners the tools they need to help save the pollinators.
She put it bluntly, “Without bees we don’t eat.”
Oliveira also said they prove that even a dense city of 84,000 people living in about 4 square miles can make a difference.
Keene, New Hampshire, is doing an inventory of city properties that could house bee habitats. And in Maine, its Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife put out a call for residents to hunt for the rusty patched bumblebee and take a picture of it for the state. “We need more eyes!” the state posted on its website, Maine.gov.
Hall said the team picked the rusty patched bumblebee because it is the only continental U.S. bee on the endangered species list, put there back in 2017 after 87 percent of its population vanished, according the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Seven other kinds of U.S. bees are on the list but they only live on the Hawaiian islands.
For people who don’t see that there’s a bug problem in the U.S., he asks that they think of what he calls, “the windshield test.”
“A few years ago, when you’d drive across the countryside you’d get lots and lots of dead bugs splattered on your windshield,” Hall said. “Now, not so much. The reality is that humans are highly effective at killing insects. Pesticides, loss of habitat are the culprits.”
Farmer, 23, of Fort Worth, Texas, said that all bumblebees are fascinating creatures that are “way smarter than most people think. They work in teams.” If you find one, you know there’s a colony nearby, she said.
It can still be found in small regions in the upper Midwest. She said the critter rarely stings, and she likes when one lands on her outstretched arm or hand.
“My work is going in stages,” Farmer said, adding that she is an entomologist by trade. “I look at policies across the region to find what is relevant. We work with data scientists for our automated queries. Then we’ll crunch the numbers. I read and re-read the Endangered Species Act a lot.”
They’re in the university’s lab at the Marine Science Center in Nahant, Massachusetts every Wednesday and they sometimes do call cities and towns for clarifications on the rules they find.
“If it helps the bees, we want to know about it,” Hall said.
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