The Cockerell bumblebee bee is alive and well and living in New Mexico, scientists from the University of California, Riverside report. The Cockerell, the rarest species of bumblebee in the United States, was last seen in 1956.

The Cockerell bumblebee bee is alive and well and living in New Mexico, scientists from the University of California, Riverside report. The Cockerell, the rarest species of bumblebee in the United States, was last seen in 1956.


But on August 31 a team from the university found three of them along a highway north of Cloudcroft, New Mexico. Cockerell's bumblebee is believed to live in an area of less than 300 square miles, giving it the most limited range of any bumblebee species in the world.

There are nearly 50 species of native U.S. bumblebees, several on the verge of extinction because of habituate loss. "Franklin's Bumblebee," for example, has been seen only once since 2003.

The good news for the Cockerell's Bumblebee is that unlike many rare species, its range is mostly composed of National Forest and Apache tribal land, so it's unlikely to be under serious threat of habitat loss at the moment, says Douglas Yanega, senior museum scientist at UC Riverside.

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