Portions of the Monongahela National Forest in Eastern Pocahontas and Greenbrier counties could be considered “critical habitat†by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, needed to protect the endangered rusty patched bumblebee from extinction.
The Monongahela National Forest could be considered “critical habitat†for the rusty patched bumblebee by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
JILL UTRUP/USFWS | Courtesy photo
The bumblebee was listed as an endangered species in 2017, after it underwent an abrupt and widespread decline, disappearing from 90% of its known range, which once included parts of 28 states and two Canadian provinces. Reasons for the decline are unclear, but the spread of a pathogen carried by domestic bees and exposure to certain insecticides and fungicides are believed to be factors.
The endangered pollinator derives its name from a patch of rust-colored hair that appears on an abdominal segment of both male and female workers bees. The bee also has a mostly yellow upper body with a black spot resembling a thumb tack between its wings. Rusty patched bumblebees feed on nectar from a variety of flowers from early spring through fall, and rest in underground nests.
The Fish and Wildlife Service announced last week that is proposing to designate a total of 1.6 million acres — spread through 33 counties in West Virginia, Virginia, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin — as critical habitat for the endangered insect.
A proposed rule designating the 1.6 million acres in six states as critical habitat for the endangered bumblebee appeared in the Federal Register on Nov. 26, opening a 60-day public comment period.
Most of that acreage is found on private land, where landowners would not be affected by a critical habitat designation unless an activity is funded or authorized by a federal agency. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, designation of critical habitat does not affect land ownership or establish a refuge or preserve.
However, all of the proposed critical habitat land in West Virginia lies within the Monongahela National Forest, where U.S. Forest Service officials are charged with minimizing impacts to the endangered bumblebee’s habitat when conducting such activities as road and trail building and logging.
The rusty patched bumblebee was one of four endangered species that played a key role in a federal appeals court decision that brought work on the Atlantic Coast Pipeline to a halt in late 2018.
In 2019, field surveys to study the rusty patched bumblebee’s presence in West Virginia turned up 10 of the rare pollinators at sites in Tucker, Mineral, Randolph, Grant and Pocahontas counties.
The Fish and Wildlife Service lumped West Virginia’s proposed critical habitat area in with Virginia’s, listing a total of 118,603 acres in the both states. A map indicates that well more than half of that land lies in Virginia, and that southeast Pocahontas County contains most of the West Virginia land. Only the extreme northeast corner of Greenbrier County is included in the proposed critical habitat zone.
All of the Virginia land is contained within bordering Highland and Bath counties.
The critical habitat designation proposal is the result of a lawsuit filed in 2021 by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of Minnesota Scientific and Natural Areas who successfully challenged a 2020 decision by Fish and Wildlife not to designate critical habitat for the insect.
