Global Warming: Bees and Flowers

Global warming is having a deleterious affect on the 20,000 known species of bees around the globe. And destruction of natural habitat has been rampant in recent decades. There are over 5,000 native species of bees in North America that are responsible for pollinating the lion's share of plants between the Arctic and the trees of the Sonoran desert.
Bumblebee populations have been hit particularly hard. Since 1999, the rusty-patched bumblebee, whose habitat spanned from Quebec to Vermont, has disappeared along with four other bumblebee species. Franklin's bumblebee of northern California and southern Oregon is also now believed to be extinct. Large populations of western bumblebees that inhabited the entire west coast of North America have severely declined in the past decade.