Critically Endangered
Franklin's bumblebee
Bombus franklini
Franklin's bumblebee is a generalist forager that collects nectar and pollen from several wildflowers, such as lupine, California poppy, and horsemint.
Appearance
Franklin's bumblebee is distinguished from other bumblebees by a solid black abdomen, with a yellow U-shaped pattern on the anterior thorax. Females have black hair on their faces and the vertices, with some light hairs mixed above and below their antennal bases, whereas most similar bumblebee species have yellow. Males of this species are similar except their malar spaces are as long as they are wide, the hair on their faces is yellow, and tergum 6 has some pale hairs laterally.
Range and habitat
Franklin's bumblebee is one of the most narrowly distributed bumblebee species, making it a critically endangered bee in the western United States. It lives only in a 190-by-70-mile (310 by 110 km) area in southern Oregon and northern California, between the Coast and Sierra-Cascade mountain ranges.
Some experts, such as professor Dave Goulson at the University of Sussex, say this species is already extinct, but until more concrete evidence is shown, it has been assigned a conservation status rank of G1 (critically imperiled) by NatureServe, and categorized as critically endangered by the IUCN Red List.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
Franklin's bumblebee is a generalist forager that collects nectar and pollen from several wildflowers, such as lupine, California poppy, and horsemint.
In crisis
The population of this bumblebee species has decreased drastically since 1998, with last sighting in Oregon, in 2006. A petition was submitted by the Xerces Society, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Center for Food Safety to the California Fish and Game Commission in October 2018 to list Franklin's bumblebee and three others as endangered under the California Endangered Species Act. On June 12, 2019, the California Fish and Game Commission voted to add all four bumblebees, among them Franklin's bumblebee, to the list of protected species under the California Endangered Species Act.
Franklin's bumblebee is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Franklin's bumblebee, Wikidata item Q2264002. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
