By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Jude Isabella, over at the newly returned bioGraphic about their new story on the new bees in South America. Here’s what I wrote about it:
There are about 265 different species of bumblebee in the world, but the introduction of non-native bees can cause serious issues. Non-native bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) are causing serious ecological problems in Chile, where they have caused a significant decline in the population of local pollinators, particularly B. dahlbomii, Patagonia’s only endemic bumblebee, which has seen its population decrease by (per some estimates) 90 percent. Chile approved the adoption of B. terrestris at scale in 1997 as the country attempted to expand its agriculture industry. This affected more than just Chile — neighboring Argentina prohibited the import, but that didn’t matter as Chile’s use of B. terrestris meant that feral colonies have advanced about 200 kilometers into Ar…