(energetic music) - [Bret] University of Minnesota researchers are on the hunt for some very important insects.

(energetic music) - Bumblebees, I like them 'cause they're big and fuzzy and easy to find and identify.

We're mostly here just to see what's out here, kind of, you know, look for what species are here, look for rare species, anything interesting.

They're very docile.

They'll really only sting you if you, like, grab 'em or if you're like poking around their nest.

But for the most part, like, you can go up.

You can go up to flowers, get really close, and they just, they don't even care.

- The way bumblebee's pollinate, it's really special.

We call it buzz pollination.

There are some flowers where the pollen is not outside to actually have a capsule it.

And the way bumblebees pollinate those flowers is they will attach to that flower, and they'll start vibrating or shaking the whole body and making this sound, this (imitates buzzing), buzz sound.

And what they're doing is just shaking the flower and getting all that pollen out.

Honeybees can't do that, and you know, bumblebees are just big, fuzzy, prettier.

(Cristian laughs) (gentle upbeat music) - [Bret] But these big, fuzzy, pretty insects face an immense array of challenges, as the number of native bumblebees in Minnesota is declining.

- Technically, there are 25 species recorded from the state, but currently, there's only 22 'cause one is extinct, and two are extirpated.

(screen buzzes) They exist but not in Minnesota anymore.

(bright music) There's a lot of reasons, habitat loss, pesticides, climate change.

For the bumblebees especially, a disease came through and wiped out a few species, and that happened in the mid or late 1990s.

- [Bret] The University of Minnesota Bee Lab is using a data-driven approach to help these threatened creatures.

- First of all, we are going into the field, making surveys to see what's out there.

You can't know what you lose if you don't know what you have.

But most importantly, we rely on this historical collection of insects that we have.

(bright music) We are georeferencing, so basically, all of these insects come attached with information of where they were collected and when they were collected.

With those historical data, we can now compare, hey, if 100 years ago, I was in this place, I can go here and find out what bumblebees I found.

I can go out today and see which ones I can find now.

But more important is if I have a good time series of a species, I can see where they occur throughout time.

That information's very important because it allows us to create targeted conservation strategies for each different organism.

(upbeat music) - [Bret] Over the years, the process of collecting this data has become friendlier to the bee, which is especially important as Minnesota is one of the few places on the planet where one can find the federally endangered rusty patch bumblebee.

- Before, in order to have evidence that a species occurred in a place, we'll go, we'll collect them, we'll preserve them, and it'll end up in a slide right here.

Now we have accumulated enough knowledge in bumblebees where now we can try to do monitoring efforts that are what we call non-lethal, so we don't need to kill a specimen.

So we can go out to the field, take the data, place the date and who collected it, write that data, take a picture, and now that picture becomes a specimen.

(upbeat music) - [Bret] Researchers are working to expand their catalog to include specific DNA data of Minnesota bees.

- We're trying to find pieces of the DNA where we see variability within the species.

It's very low, but it's different enough from other species.

Now there are regions on the genome that we can do that, and it's been going on for some time now.

We've called this The Barcode of Life 'cause it's the analogy, right, that a sequence of DNA, so letters A, T, G, and C, that's what DNA is made out of, it can basically tell me what a species is if I knew where it came from.

So we are creating that barcode database, but there is a very important difference that we need to do with those barcodes.

A box of my favorite cereal here is going to have probably the same barcode as in my home country in Guatemala.

So that database is just gonna be very stable.

Now we wish life was that easy, (Cristian laughs) but because this DNA has evolved through time, there's variability that happens within those.

What we are doing here is we are increasing the amount of specimen information from Minnesota.

So if people want to do research in Minnesota, have a way to compare genetic information of Minnesota species, and we're not relying on information from other places.

(gentle upbeat music) - [Bret] Thanks in part to the genetic database that Cristian's team is currently building, the future of population monitoring will leave physical specimens out of the equation entirely, turning instead to a forensic investigation of the scene.

- Just like now, we can go out and take a picture of a bumblebee and know what that bumblebee is just because we have thousands of specimens that we've already compared.

When we build these genetic databases, every insect that has stepped here has left some print.

That print has DNA.

So imagine a place where I can go to a flower, I can just take a swab on the flower or a piece of that flower, extract DNA or all the signatures that things that were there left.

But our vision is being able to ask who was here.

And we don't need direct evidence, or at least in the form of specimens.

(gentle upbeat music) - [Bret] Regardless of the advances in methodology, researchers say knowing what is happening to the bumblebees can be critical to understanding much larger trends.

- There have been something that we call the insect apocalypse and one of the things that scientists have observed is that a number of those insects are reducing.

So the reason we're trying to see what happened with bumblebees, especially here in Minnesota, is because we have a robust enough data set in the form of specimens and history that we can actually measure that decline and put a number on that.

Now there is millions of species out there, and we don't have the luxury of having that data from everything else.

So the name of the research of this project is Overcoming Insect Decline: Bumblebees to the Rescue.

And the way bumblebees are rescuing us is allowing us to understand and sort of serve as an example of what could happen with many of things that we don't even know yet exist.

(gentle upbeat music) - [Bret] One thing the researchers are grateful for is the general public's interest in the plight of these pollinators.

- You see a lot, these days, people wanting to plant pollinator gardens and do other things to help the bees, and that stuff, it makes a difference, you know, especially in urban and suburban areas where there aren't necessarily a lot of good floral resources.

Like, having a pollinator garden can actually do a lot to support bees and bumblebees.

(gentle upbeat music) - Insects, pollinators, they know how to do their job if we just provide them jobs by creating places where they can go, gather, feed.

As simple as saying, "I'm gonna plant some pretty flowers in my garden," preferably if they're native, or, "I'm gonna plant some tomatoes so I have a lot to eat, and my pollinators have something to eat."

- [Bret] On the topic of conservation, Cristian has some parting thoughts on the underlying reason why good stewardship of the environment is so important to us all.

- Nature is out there, and it just occurs.

We are part of it, and it sustained our lifestyle.

What's happening right now is that we are accelerating the loss of that ecosystem.

I have one teacher that told me one time, "Conservation has one objective, conservation of humankind."

(Cristian laughs) Bumblebees probably outlived us.

Insects are definitely gonna outlive us as humans.

Life is resilient.

It has gone through glaciations, through a meteorite, through several extinctions.

So a lot of these conservation efforts are also for us, and we can be here longer here on this planet.

- [Bret] And that sure would bee nice.

(gentle music fades)