Intensive monitoring for bees in North America: indispensable or improvident?

Continued reports of bee declines have prompted repeated calls for a national monitoring programme in the United States. Here, we argue that such a large-scale surveillance monitoring programme would consume inordinate resources without providing the sought-after data in a meaningful time period. Surveillance monitoring cannot provide reliable and timely measures of absolute or relative population size, species richness or diversity, host plant and nest site preferences or typical foraging ranges. In addition, the multitude of specimens captured by the passive traps commonly used to surveil overwhelm our identification capacity and, in some cases, may even accelerate species decline. Conversely, surveillance monitoring should be pursued when data can be collected non-lethally for readily identifiable species or species groups (e.g., bumble bees) or when widely distributed sentinel plants can be observed (e.g., sunflowers). Lethal collections should continue at appropriate temporal intervals but only at a limited number of representative areas with accurate historic records. We advocate that emphasis be placed on a targeted, natural-history approach aimed at addressing specific hypotheses and exploring solutions to conservation management problems. We already know enough about the drivers of bee decline to formulate and test potential solutions. While additional information is of value in understanding bee diversity, distributions and evolution, we do not need it to begin to take action; we should be focusing on the best ways to help bee species endure rather than attempting to accumulate even more evidence that they are in trouble.

Automated summary

Proposals for a national monitoring programme in the US have been made, but it is argued that such a large-scale surveillance monitoring programme would be resource-intensive and may not provide relevant data in a timely manner. It is suggested that surveillance monitoring should focus on non-lethal data collection for easily identifiable species or species groups, while lethal collections should continue at limited representative areas with accurate historical records. The emphasis should be placed on a targeted, natural-history approach to address specific hypotheses and explore solutions to conservation management problems.