Agreement Ensures Swift Consideration of Habitat Protection for Endangered Rusty Patched Bumblebees

NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council), the Center for Biological Diversity, and Friends of Minnesota Scientific and Natural Areas in 2021 challenged the Service’s failure to designate critical habitat for the bee.

This agreement, which comes after the court struck down the Service’s original determination that such a designation was not prudent, requires the agency to revisit its determination by Nov. 20, 2024. If the Service proposes to designate critical habitat for the bee, the agreement requires it to finalize that determination by Oct. 31, 2025.

The bee was listed as an endangered species in 2017, in part due to the loss of 99% of its native grasslands in the Northeast and upper Midwest. But the Service determined in September 2020 that designating critical habitat for the bees was “not prudent.”

The judge rejected that claim and held that the Service could forego designating critical habitat “only if the designation would not be beneficial for the species,” which the judge found was not supported by the facts.

The designation of critical habitat would be a significant boon to the bee: A study by the Center for Biological Diversity has found that plants and animals with federally protected critical habitat are more than twice as likely to be moving toward recovery than species without it.

The Endangered Species Act requires the Service to designate critical habitat for listed species, with few exceptions.

Background

Once common in the Midwest and Northeast, the rusty patched bumblebee has suffered an 87% decline and was protected under the Endangered Species Act in 2017 after a petition from the Xerces Society followed by an NRDC lawsuit. The Service then failed to designate critical habitat by the statutory deadline, prompting another lawsuit by NRDC in 2019.

A legal agreement with NRDC requiring the agency to move forward with a decision on critical habitat in summer of 2020 resulted in the Service concluding that it could not determine critical habitat for the bee, which prompted the current lawsuit.

The decline of the rusty patched bumblebee is part of a troubling trend of declines in many of the 4,000-plus species of native bees in the United States. Native bees often provide more effective pollination of native plants than honeybees, who are not native to the United States. Wild pollinator declines across North America are caused by habitat loss, agricultural intensification, pesticide use, invasive species, climate change and pathogens.

About 90% of wild plants and 75% of leading global food crops depend on animal pollinators for reproduction, and the great majority of that work is done by bees.

Despite the growing evidence of declining bee populations, the rusty patched bumblebee is one of only two bees in the continental United States currently protected under the Endangered Species Act. Franklin’s bumblebee was listed as endangered in 2021 but last seen in 2006.

The Service currently has before it numerous petitions to list bees, including the Western, American, Southern Plains and Suckley’s bumblebees and solitary Mojave Poppy bee.