Over 20,000 species worldwide, mostly solitary and unmanaged — the pollinators underpinning most flowering plants, now facing mounting, well-documented decline.
Wild bees are found on every continent except Antarctica, ranging from solitary ground-nesting species to social bumblebees. In Europe alone, more than 1,928 species have now been assessed for the IUCN Red List — the most comprehensive evaluation of the group to date.
An estimated 10% of European wild bees (at least 172 of 1,928 assessed species) are now at risk of extinction — more than double the 77 species considered threatened in a 2014 assessment.
Source: IUCN Red List, October 2025Data quality has also improved sharply: the share of European wild bee species classified as "Data Deficient" — too poorly studied to assess — fell from 57% in 2014 to 14% today, meaning today's higher threat count partly reflects better information, not only a worsening trend.
Up to 90% of Europe's flowering plants depend on animal pollination, most of it performed by wild bees rather than managed honeybees. Wild bees are critical for both crop pollination and the reproduction of wild plants — including flower-rich meadows and many orchid species that have no other effective pollinator.
It's worth separating wild bee decline from the more widely reported managed-honeybee "colony collapse" headlines (U.S. beekeepers lost a record 55.6% of managed colonies in 2024–25). These are different phenomena affecting different populations — managed honeybees are a single, intensively bred species maintained by beekeepers, while "wild bees" covers over 20,000 largely solitary species with no beekeeper to replace lost colonies. Conflating the two understates how serious wild bee decline actually is, since wild species can't be restocked the way a commercial hive can.
The EU Nature Restoration Regulation now includes an EU-wide pollinator monitoring system intended to track progress against recovery targets. Effective measures identified in current research include restoring flower-rich meadow habitat, reducing pesticide and nitrogen inputs near natural habitat, and maintaining the low-intensity traditional land management that many wild bee species evolved alongside.
The 2025 European assessment is the most comprehensive to date, but comparable global data is far patchier — most detailed pollinator decline research so far comes from Europe and North America, and status outside those regions is much less certain. Attribution among overlapping pressures (habitat loss, pesticides, climate change) is difficult to fully separate for any single species.