What’s the bee picture?
Evidence is growing on a global scale suggesting that pollinating insects – including our star pollinators, bees – are declining in numbers. The primary cause of this decline is that, like many other creatures in the natural world, bees are being pushed out of their natural habitat by human development. As more than 30% of our fruit and vegetable crops in the U.S. depend on pollinating insects, and especially bees, this decline in bee populations has important potential consequences for us humans as well as for our surrounding wildlands. Work in California Wildlands. Our research group at UCB has been working since1987 on documenting bee diversity and bee frequencies on wild California plants in three locations: two in the lower San Joaquin Valley and one in the coastal mountains in upper Carmel Valley. Our goal was to gather some basic information about native bees before the Africanized honey bee (AHB) arrives in northern California. This information could then be used to assess the
