An Endangered Bumble Bee

On January 11, 2017, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the rusty patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis) would be added to the List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife. The ruling will become effective February 10, 2017. In issuing its ruling, USFWS stated, "While the exact cause of the species' decline is uncertain, the primary causes attributed to the decline include habitat loss and degradation, pathogens, pesticides, and small population dynamics." Some researchers believe that one of the most significant contributors may have been the introduction of a disease from commercial bee colonies into wild populations.

The rusty patched bumble bee is one of the first bumble bees to appear in the spring when solitary queens begin their colonies. Queens continue egg laying throughout the hive's active months. Worker bees are produced during the summer. They are responsible for collecting food, defending the colony, and taking care of young bees. In late summer and early fall, potential new queens and males hatch. Young queens mate and store sperm over the winter, and the cycle begins again the next spring.

As recently as the 1990s, the rusty patched bumble bee was common across a broad region that encompassed 31 states and Canadian provinces. Subsequently, rusty patched bumble bee populations have declined, and since 2000 it has been reported in only 14 states and provinces. The reduction in territory represents an 87% loss of the species' spatial extent. Follow-up studies have documented continued declines.

For more information

"Endangered Species Status for Rusty Patched Bumble Bee," A Rule by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Federal Register, January 11, 2017.

"Rusty Patched Bumble Bee: The First Bee in the Continental US to be Protected Under the Endangered Species Act," by Sarina Jepsen, Director of Endangered Species and Aquatic Conservation, Xerces Society, January 11, 2017.

How you can help

Help monitor bumble bee populations. Learn more from Bumble Bee Watch.

Learn more about native pollinators: Attracting Native Pollinators: Protecting North America's Bees and Butterflies, the Xerces Society Guide. Available from the Pier Press Bookstore.

Technologies for Spreading the Word

On a Sunday afternoon not long ago, my daughter called to chat. My phone provides the option of assigning photos to specific people, so when she calls I see her wearing a paper pirate hat and laughing. It's a picture from a fun trip during which we toured a pirate ship at a museum. The treasure is in the memories. As we talked about this and that for close to an hour, I felt a deep sense of gratitude for being able to connect with her.

I'm also delighted that her brothers keep in touch with varying regularity. They each bring a unique style to the art of communication. One son prefers to converse via text messaging. He can apparently type with thumbs at the speed of a thought. My typing abilities, initially developed on a typewriter and later adapted to a computer keyboard, fail on my phone's tiny interface. Additionally, the device's autocorrect feature sometimes "helps," introducing a level of confusion into conversations. But we usually muddle through.  The other son, whose work entails a lot of travel, checks in from time to time from random states across the country. The message is often brief, just a quick "Hi" or a picture with a caption. But the contact serves an important function. It lets me know he's okay, and sometimes I can even figure out where he is.

Social media provides similar types of connections. In recent months, I've seen pictures of a friend's newborn granddaughter, my niece's vacation, and a cousin's front yard—still intact after a hurricane encounter. None of these messages were particularly earthshaking, but they let me know immediately: The baby arrived; mother and child are both healthy. Travel plans went smoothly; we're having a great time. We made it through the storm; all is well. Even when things haven't gone according to plan, knowing about problems and being able to participate in solutions helps me feel connected to people I care about.

This ability to receive nearly instantaneous messages is one I sometimes take for granted. Every once in a while, however, I stop to think about what it was like for people who had to rely on different technologies in earlier times.

Before internet connections, before text messaging, and even before telephone conversations, urgent news arrived via telegram. Before that, messages traveled by boat or horseback. Sometimes runners carried them. In some cultures, messages were sent by smoke signal or the sounding of drums.

The desire to make announcements and tell stories about life events seems an integral part of the human experience. Newspaper Rock, a State Historic Monument in Utah, contains a collection of carvings called petroglyphs. Some of the images date back nearly two thousand years. The meaning of the messages engraved in the rock has been lost through time, but recognizable images include human and animal shapes along with abstract forms. The Navajo name for the location, Tse' Hane, means "rock that tells a story." There are similarly engraved rocks in Arizona that depict clan, spiritual, and event information.

In ancient times, natives of the American west were not unique in their yearning to tell the daily news.

Slightly more than two thousand years ago in Israel, without access to social media, email, or even a telegraph service, God wanted to make an important announcement. He wanted to tell people about the birth of his Son. To get the word out, he used a star to guide the Magi. He sent an angelic herald to tell a group of shepherds, "Fear not: For behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord" (Luke 2:10-11).

Other characters in the nativity story received messages in dreams and interpreted the writings of ancient prophets. These old-school tools don't have the shiny pizzazz of modern technology, yet the message they delivered continues to stir the hearts of all who receive it.

May the message continue to spread: Merry Christmas.

—by Karen Bellenir

© 2016; reprinted with permission. This article was first published on December 2, 2016, in the author's newspaper column, Happy to Be Here, which appears monthly in the Farmville Herald.

First Flight

Look up. It's a plane! It may be carrying business people to meetings, vacationers to exotic locations, or holiday travelers to visit distant family members. Planes crisscross the skies with such frequency that it is easy to forget that heavier-than-air flight is a technology just slightly more than a century old.

The first flight took place on December 17, 1903, at 10:30 a.m. at Kitty Hawk, in North Carolina's Outer Banks. Orville and Wilbur Wright took a total of four flights that day. The first flight lasted 12 seconds; the fourth went a distance of 852 feet in 59 seconds. From this tentative beginning, aviation and aeronautics opened the world, and indeed the universe, to travel and exploration.

A Place to Visit
Wright Brothers National Memorial
1401 National Park Drive
Manteo, NC 27954

This article, along with more information, originally appeared in the December 2016 issue of Observations: A Pier Press® Newsletter. To view the complete newsletter, visit our online archives. Also, please consider becoming a subscriber so that future editions can be delivered directly to your inbox. Subscriptions are free!