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The new study, which is published in the journal One Earth, analysed records from three centuries of collections that include more than 20,000 known bee species around the world.
It found that declines were not evenly distributed across bee families. While records of Halictid bees, the second most common family, have declined by 17% since the 1990s, those for Melittidae – a much rarer family – have plummeted by more than 41%.
Scientists have warned that a lack of scientific data on insect declines in tropical countries is hampering their understanding of global bee declines, with most GBIF records covering North America and Europe.
The study’s authors acknowledged that the declines in species might in part reflect changes in GBIF’s collection of data over time or the heterogeneous character of its datasets.
Zattara said while their study did not establish the status of individual bee species, it showed a clear global trend with a diminishing diversity of species likely to indicate global declines in bees and other pollinators.
“It’s about confirming what’s been shown to happen locally is going on globally,” he said. “And also, about the fact that much better certainty will be achieved as more data are shared with public databases.”
He warned that waiting for further data to more precisely confirm the type of bee and other pollinator declines could leave it too late to save them.
“Something is happening to the bees, and something needs to be done. We cannot wait until we have absolute certainty because we rarely get there in natural sciences,” he said. “The next step is prodding policymakers into action while we still have time. The bees cannot wait.”
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