Researchers in Canada playing detective with the yellow-banded bumblebee's genome have found evidence that inbreeding and disease are the likely reasons for the decline of the species, York University associate professor Amro Zayed says.
The team led by Zayed, Sheila Colla and biology researcher Clement Kent believes it is the first time the genome of an at-risk bumblebee has been sequenced.
"We took one queen and used new sequencing technology that gave us very long stretches of DNA to sequence and assemble the reference genome for Bombus terricola," the yellow-banded bumblebee, Zayed said.