This summer, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife is once again asking residents to look out for one of Maine’s most elusive native species: the rusty patched bumble bee.
It’s one of two native species of bumble bee that hasn’t been seen in the state in years. It’s considered a rare species of special concern by the state, and was the first bumble bee species to be added to the U.S. Endangered Species List.
“I’ve always felt that the best chance that we have for rediscovering the rusty patched bumble bee in Maine is somebody’s going to take a picture of it in their backyard garden, and that’s how we’re going to find it,” said Beth Swartz, a wildlife biologist specializing in invertebrates at the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.
“I just feel like that has the best chances of rediscovering it,” she continued.
The search for the rusty patched bumble bee started in earnest in 2015, when IFW began work on the Maine Bumble Bee Atlas.
Over several years, volunteers with the community science project took photos of bumble bees around the state and submitted them to the department.
“We had hundreds of people, volunteers, all around the state, documenting the bumble bees that they saw, and that’s how we were able to kind of get a much better sense of what our native species were here in Maine, how they were distributed, which ones were relatively common and abundant, and which ones seemed to be rare or missing from the 17 native species that we had,” Swartz said.
The project helped raise awareness of bumble bees, and how to identify different species.
“Most people think that we only have one kind of bumble bee,” Swartz said. “A bumble bee is a bumblebee. They don’t realize that we have multiple different species.”
While bumble bees are typically habitat generalists, it’s important to be aware of different species and protect them, she said.
“They all have different roles that they play in the environment and add to the diversity of our natural history,” Swartz said. “And so, the more species that you lose, the less diverse we become, and we don’t always understand the consequences that might result from that.”
Altogether the atlas project resulted in more than 27,000 new records of bumble bees in Maine, she said.
After that, the department worked to identify each bee, and start to understand what species were more common in the state, and which were rare.
Out of that work, the state listed the Ashton’s cuckoo bumble bee as endangered, under Maine’s Endangered Species Act, and several more were identified as species of concern.
In total, the atlas project was able to identify 15 of Maine’s 17 native species of bumble bees. But two were still missing: the American bumble bee and the rusty patched bumble bee.
The department continued to look for the rusty patched bumble bee, Swartz said, conducting targeted searches for the species in the midcoast, western mountains and parts of southern Maine — but with no luck.
“That’s kind of where you feel like you’re looking for the eye of a needle in a haystack,” Swartz said. “Maine is a relatively big state when you’re looking for something the size of your thumbnail.”
One challenge is identifying the species of bumble bee.
The rusty patched bumble bee is known for the rust colored swathe on the lower section of its body. Importantly, the rust colored patch does not wrap all the way around the bee’s body, the colored area is on its back with yellow coloring on the sides.
It also has a black patch in between its wings that resembles a thumb tack shape, with a wide oval top that tapers into a V.
They’re often confused with the orange belted bumble bee, Swartz said, which has a larger rust colored band that goes all the way around the bee’s body. The orange belted bumble bee also has a distinct black V-shape between its wings.
The rusty patched bumble bee was last seen in Maine in 2009, Swartz said.
The species was once common throughout the Eastern part of the country, with habitat ranging south to Georgia and north of Maine into Canada, and continuing west to the Great Lakes region.
“We have records that show it was fairly widespread in Maine — not necessarily the entire state, but fairly widespread and regularly observed up through the mid 90s,” Swartz said.
Now the habitat has shrunk to nearly 90% of its historical range, she said. The remaining populations are mostly in the upper midwest, and a small population was rediscovered near the intersection of Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland.
Swartz said the fact that the species “has held on in certain places that still have some good reproducing healthy populations … gives us hope here in Maine that we might still have the species here.”
It’s hard to know exactly what caused the decline, Swartz said, but it was likely a combination of factors: diseases, pesticides and habitat loss.
Pesticides can weaken a bumble bees’ ability to fight off diseases, which native species can sometimes pick up from commercially raised bumble bees that are used as greenhouse pollinators.
Even if wildlife biologists can pinpoint the issue affecting a population, it’s difficult to counteract it.
“It’s hard to overcome things like that,” Swartz said. “Those are not all things that we can have quick, easy fixes for.”
Unlike the rusty patched bumble bee, the other species not found during the atlas search, the American bumble bee, is considered extirpated in Maine, meaning it’s fully gone from the habitat, Swartz said.
The American bumble bee was last seen in the state in the 1950s, and Swartz said there isn’t strong evidence that it was ever common in the state.
“I don’t think we’ll ever know what the true status of that species was here in Maine,” Swartz said. “Was it actually here? If it was here, was it always rare? And just because it was so rare, when that started to decline at the edge of the range, it’s just been long gone.”
In recent years, the department has moved on from the targeted searches for the rusty patched bumble bee. But every summer Swartz shares a blog post with details on how to identify the species. She still hasn’t given up hope that it’s out there.
She compares it to the Ashton’s cuckoo bumble bee that was found during the atlas project.
“It just took one volunteer to get lucky, and find the bee,” Swartz said. “So that’s why I don’t really give up hope and write it off yet. And you know, wildlife, bees, insects are resilient too, and they can come back.”
People looking to support bumble bees and other insects can plant native plants at home, and avoid the use of pesticides, she said.
“So planting a pollinator garden is one thing that people can do, and then it brings bumble bees in close where you can observe them, too,” Swartz said. “And then encouraging people to, if they’re willing, to let things go a little wild, to not mow as often.”
And if you think you’ve seen the rusty patched bumble bee, take a picture and submit to iNaturalist or Bumble Bee Watch, where experts can confirm the identification.
“We really appreciate the fact that people are looking and trying,” Swartz said. “And like I said, I guess I believe that if we’re going to find it at all, it’s going to be somebody in the public is going to find it and take a picture of it, which will be wonderful.”
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