Colorado researchers and educators are ramping up efforts to protect native bees and other pollinators, just as support for conservation is shrinking at the national level. A new state program, backed by groundbreaking legislation, is working to safeguard these crucial species through local action, even as federal funding and environmental protections face mounting rollbacks.
“In general, there’s a subset of our population which thinks that knowledge is a danger,” Dr. Adrian Carper, an ecology professor and senior ecologist with the city of Boulder, said. “What I argue is that knowledge should not be seen as danger. Knowledge is what gives us the tools we need to make decisions, and without it, it’s much harder to make decisions.”
Carper, who has been researching pollinators for 17 years, joined the newly minted Colorado Invertebrates and Rare Plants Parks and Wildlife Commission as the Pollinator Conservation Program Manager this year.
The Commission was formed in 2024 under HB24-1117, which reclassified bees as wildlife and made them eligible for state conservation and research funding. It aims to facilitate collaboration between researchers and enforcement authorities to investigate and identify pragmatic conservation measures for invertebrates at the local and state levels.
For local organizers, the program couldn’t have come at a better time.
“In the climate that we’re in right now, grassroots is where we have to be because it’s really hard to crack into the egg that has been situated at the White House,” said Jessica Goldstrohm, a pollinator educator who works with local ecology organizations in Broomfield.
This was echoed by Joyce Kennedy, Executive Director of the People and Pollinators Action Network. The People and Pollinators Action Network led the effort on HB24-1117 and pushed for the state to conduct the Colorado Native Pollinating Insects Study, an in-depth look at the state of pollinators in Colorado.
“(The study) can set the stage,” Kennedy said. “Especially in a time where conservation work is going to be at a standstill in some ways, the kind of work we can do at the local and state level is really significant and important.”
The Colorado pollinator study found that insect biomass, abundance and biodiversity are all continuing to decline in Colorado. It also identified conservation priorities to help mitigate the decline. The outlook is especially bleak for bees, which have traditionally found refuge in the diverse range of habitats found in and around the Rocky Mountains.
The study recommends that 20% of Colorado bee species be classified as endangered due to habitat loss, invasive non-native species, insecticide use and climate change. Colorado’s native bees are distinct from other insects due to their coevolution and dependence on native flower species.
“Their entire life cycles are linked to the health of those flowers, and those flowers have become dependent on them,” Carper said. “So this coevolution, this codiversification through evolutionary time has occurred where we now have thousands of species of flowers, all dependent on thousands of species of bees, and all of those other insects just benefit from those existing.”
Now that the Colorado pollinator study has been published, the People and Pollinators Action Network is trying to make the 300-page document accessible for Coloradans by creating and distributing educational materials. The organization is also heading initiatives to replace astroturf with grass and establish native seed and plant exchanges.
National Politics Hit the Front Range
National-scale conservation efforts are going in a very different direction. Since January, the Trump Administration has proposed sweeping changes to the 1970 Environmental Protection Act, ordered the dismantling of the Institute for Museum and Library Services and, most recently, targeted the National Science Foundation, which currently funds more than 30,000 research projects in the U.S. with $9 billion in federal grants.
The Butterfly Pavilion, a national center for pollinator research and education in Westminster, is already feeling the sting of these changes. The pavilion received about $400,000 in federal grants over the past several years, including a $98,000 IMLS grant for biodiversity research. The research center only received half of the promised funding before the rest was revoked when the Department of Government Efficiency’s shuttered the institute last month.
“This was our only IMLS grant in the past five years, and the loss of both current and potential future funding presents a real challenge for our educational programming and operational capacity,” said Jennifer Quermann, Butterfly Pavilion director of communications and marketing. “This comes at a time when we need more resources, not fewer, to address the challenges facing these vital species.”
The pavilion also applied for IMLS funding for the upcoming year, which will no longer be available. Now pivoting to other funding avenues, Quermann said the pavilion is filling the gap with private contributions and grants from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and the Mexican government.
“For a nonprofit organization like ours, every dollar counts tremendously,” Quermann said. “We’re facing a concerning trend. Invertebrate populations are declining globally, yet we’re seeing reductions in funding rather than the increases desperately needed. Any reduction in funding undermines our capacity to conduct essential research, sustain conservation programs and deliver educational experiences that help the public understand the critical importance of invertebrates for our collective future.”
The Local “Hive” Helping Bees
Despite cuts to federal conservation and deepening concerns over biodiversity loss in Colorado, there is still “a lot that can be done,” according to Carper. One example Carper points to is efforts to preserve the bombus occidentalis, commonly known as the western bumble bee.
The bee’s range used to stretch from Alaska to the Rockies, but factors like competition from non-native species and rising ground temperatures due to climate change have caused its range to shrink by 57% over the past 20 years. An opportunity for state-level conservation? Bombus occidentalis’ high-alpine habitats can be protected through land management.
“Changing the impacts that climate change has really is a global narrative and solution, which is hard to affect at local scales,” Carper said. “In the meantime, for where we know those drivers exist and we can have an impact, like protecting high-alpine environments or other vulnerable habitats, creating those protections for the habitat that still exists is probably (priority) number one.”
Carper plans to hire two full-time biologists in the coming months to focus on researching and identifying more of these “drivers,” which can be approached at subnational scales.
For educator Goldstrohm, the enormity of climate change underscores the need for individual action and community organizing. Naming options like planting gardens with native species and calling representatives, she saw policy and personal initiative as a balance.
“Hope is action,” Goldstrohm said. “Hope is not imagining things happening. It’s doing something. It’s not a pretty environment right now for the environment or for human rights, but when we organize and many of us come together to work on things, then we can make a change.”
The Colorado pollinator study was a start, and Carper, the veteran ecologist, wants to continue to mobilize by connecting research of bees’ essential ecological niche to conservation policy. While his research has not yet been affected by NSF funding cuts, he acknowledged that the administration’s actions were having a significant impact on his field.
But in the long-term?
“Our lab isn’t going anywhere and the museum isn’t going anywhere, because, really, we’re the best insight from the past for how we manage things for the future,” Carper said. “Everyone, from people in their backyards to local municipalities to counties to state governments, are working on these really important issues, and they’re not going to be stopped by a lack of direction from the top-down federal level.”