Scientists in Utah put sticky traps on car bumpers to tally how many bees get hit on a typical trip. The broader toll is immense, they estimate.
Tens of millions of bees are likely being killed each day by vehicles — and that’s just in the western United States, a new study finds.Roads are a double-edged sword for pollinators, says evolutionary ecologist Joseph Wilson of Utah State University in Tooele. Medians and shoulders create space for flowering plants to flourish even as they bring insects closer to vehicles.). But such studies have focused on forested landscapes and are often biased toward larger species.
Wilson and colleagues investigated bee deaths by attaching sticky paper to the bumpers of midsize vehicles and driving stretches of highway, paved roads with slower speeds and unpaved roads during daylight hours when bees are known to be active. The team undertook 29 trips around Utah in spring and summer, traveling more than 9,334 kilometers, and identified struck bees down to the genus level. Every trip resulted in at least one bee fatality, with representatives of 14 genera.
Bees are often collateral damage of our everyday driving habits, as seen by these bees that didn’t survive an encounter with a car. At speeds over 39 kilometers per hour , a collision with a car bumper is likely to be bad for the bee, says evolutionary ecologist Joseph Wilson.One car driving between Salt Lake City and Moab might kill 50 to 175 bees, the researchers estimated.
Though the calculations are based on simplified assumptions, they are still worth taking seriously, Wilson says. “Regardless of what the number is — if it’s millions or billions — it’s a large number of bees that are being impacted,” he says. “My gut says we’re likely underestimating, because every time I drove, I hit at least one bee.”
There are ways to mitigate these deaths, the team says. Research has shown that bees typically avoid crossing roads unless there’s vegetation in the median, so planting healthy habitat along both sides of a road, but not in the middle, could be one solution.
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