Bees can't wait.

The number of registered wild bee species has decreased by 25% since 1990 - indicating that these species are no longer seen in the wild. 

“ Bees can't wait. "

A quarter of the known bee species have not been registered since 1990.

Global study shows that the number of species reported in the wild fell sharply between 1990 and 2015

According to a global analysis of bee decline, the number of wild bee species recorded in the international life database on Earth has decreased by a quarter since 1990 .

The researchers analysed bee records from museums, universities and citizen scientists compiled by the global biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), a global, government-funded network .

They found a sharp decline in bee species recorded since 1990, with around 25% fewer species reported between 2006 and 2015 than before the 1990s.

Although this does not mean that these species are extinct, it may indicate that some of them have now become too scarce to be regularly observed in the wild.

"With citizen science and the ability to share data, records are increasing exponentially, but the number of species reported in these records is decreasing," said Eduardo Zattara, biologist and lead author of the Universidad Nacional del Comahue and Argentina National. Council for Scientific and Technical Research (Conicet). "It is not yet a bee catastrophe, but we can say that wild bees are not fully developed."

A separate series of scientific studies on the decline in global insect numbers this month warned that the number of insects is falling by 10-20% every ten years and that there is an "absolutely terrifying" loss that threatens to "destroy the wall of life".

A study in the USA in 2020 found that bee shortages in agricultural areas restrict the supply of certain food crops . In the UK, the government this month received pesticides that allow farmers to use neonicotinoids, despite receiving EU-wide banned sugarbeet plants in 2018 .

The new study, published in the journal One Earth, analyzed the records of three centuries of collections containing more than 20,000 globally known bee species.

He found that the cases were not evenly distributed among the bee families. Records of halictid bees, the second most common family, have declined by 17% since the 1990s, while those of Melittidae, a much rarer family, have declined by more than 41%.

Scientists have warned that the lack of scientific data on insect decline in tropical countries prevents them from understanding the global bee decline with the most GBIF records on North America and Europe.

The authors of the study agreed that the decline in species may partly reflect changes in the data collection of the GBIF over time or the heterogeneous nature of the data sets.

Zattara said that her research does not determine the condition of individual bee species, but shows a clear global trend with decreasing biodiversity that is likely to show global declines in bees and other pollinators.

"It is about confirming that what is shown locally continues globally," he said. "And it's also about achieving much better security when more data is shared with publicly accessible databases."

He warned that waiting for more data to more accurately confirm the bee species and other pollinator drops might be too late to save them.

"Something is happening to bees, and something needs to be done. We cannot wait until we have absolute certainty, because in the natural sciences we rarely get there, " he said. "The next step is to put policy makers into action while we still have time. Bees can not wait. "