Sam Droege, 66, holds a native dead bee specimen under a microscope at the USGS Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab in Laurel, Maryland, on May 27. Photo / Salwan George, Washington Post
Sam Droege, sporting worn hiking boots and blue jeans, walked through a lush field of tall grass and poison ivy – a typical commute to the government lab he has run for more than 23 years.
The wildlife biologist paused between the two cream-coloured sheds that house one of America’s largest bee collections. His floral shirt billowed in the breeze as he pointed out different plants. “Bastard toadflax,” Droege chuckled. “Great name.” The meadow was awash with sunlight and birdsong. Butterflies and bees flitted from bud to bud, digging their furry faces into dusty pollen.
“I planned to never retire,” Droege said. “But now all of that is changing.”
Droege, a slender 66-year-old who wears his long white hair in two neat French braids, is one of the world’s leading native bee experts, devoted to tracking and identifying the insects and the plants they help maintain. And for the first time in its more than two-decade-long history, the future of the bee lab is imperilled.
The Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal calls for the defunding of the bee lab and other federally funded wildlife research efforts. Bracing for these cuts, priorities have shifted for the the lab, which has collected and identified more than 1 million specimens of pollinators, hundreds of thousands of which are slotted away in its modest walls. Active field work is on pause. No new research projects have begun.
The lab’s potential closure comes at a tough time for bees.
Droege studies native bees, the types of pollinators that only live in the wild, as opposed to honeybees, which are farmed and bred for profit. Entomologists stress that honeybees and native bees are different – sort of like farmed chickens and wild birds. But they can be exposed to the same threats, and there are signs that both are in trouble.
Native bees have experienced a steady population decline over decades and keepers of commercial honeybees reported one of their biggest colony losses ever this year. Commercial and native bees can fall victim to the same hazards, including pesticides, drought and environmental pollutants, experts said. Droege is one of the only people in the country who can distinguish most native bees from their thousands of relatives – research that helps track the insects and the plants and crops they maintain.
Native bees pollinate an estimated 80% of flowering plants around the world, and understanding the pollinators’ behaviour helps us sustain the production of our food. Forests, prairies, grasslands, deserts and wetlands rely on bees to maintain their unique biodiversity. The more we track bees, the better we can understand the role different species play in the pollination of crops such as pumpkins in the Mid-Atlantic, apples in Pennsylvania, tomatoes in California and blueberries in Oregon.
“Bees have a clear economic pathway to justify – in human terms – their value,” Droege said.
Hollis Woodard, an associate professor focused on native bees at the University of California at Riverside, said the lab is “essentially irreplaceable”. She uses its data for her work researching native bees nearly every day. “If we lose this facility and we lose these people, the hit we’re going to take to tracking bees and trying to conserve them would be absolutely devastating,” Woodard said.
The bee lab is hard to find. Only 32km from Washington, it has no official address. A GPS will take you to its hidden metal gate only if you punch in the exact longitude and latitude coordinates.
Through the gate and down a dirt road are two unassuming buildings. The first, an old garage, was once the main lab but is now filled with clutter: dusty books, mosaic-decorated file cabinets, a bee quilt and a long wooden table that was once a bowling alley.
“Everything is scavenged,” said Droege, who grew up in the area. He remembers volunteering on the refuge as a kid, studying birds. It turned into a lifelong job with the Government, observing wildlife.
The lab’s budget is small. Droege said it includes his salary and that of his sole employee, a lab manager hired about four years ago. Otherwise, he said, they have received anywhere from $3000 to $12,000 annually from the Government. But it falls under a larger federal biological research effort that the Trump administration has proposed eliminating as of October 1.
The White House wants to eliminate grants and research programmes that “duplicate other Federal research programs and focus on social agendas (e.g. climate change) to instead focus on achieving dominance in energy and critical minerals,” according to its proposal, which calls for cutting $564 million from the Interior Department’s US Geological Survey. The agency runs the bee lab and other programmes that monitor animals including birds, butterflies and bats.
“I’m sad that people have let it happen,” Droege said. A Government employee for more than 40 years, he said he was told not to speak publicly about the proposed closure. The warning hasn’t deterred him.
“I am letting people know how the loss of our publicly funded lab impacts the research and science of bees,” he said. “Nothing radical.”
The White House did not provide comment for this report.
Droege is preparing for the worst. A garden, once filled with native plants to attract specific bee species to their pollen of choice, has been opened up to the public. People are free to come and dig out the flowers for themselves.
“If we have to leave, who will take care of this?” Droege said.
In the main lab building, 91m down the road from the old garage, dead bee specimens speared by thin needles and pinned into white foam are stored in briefcase-like boxes with glass lids. Each creature is labelled with a unique number, when and where it was collected, and a corresponding QR code.
“In case we need to send it to the museum or a university,” Droege said.
As a Government organisation, the lab exists in a unique space.
“Sam’s whole role and the role of that lab is to be in service to the American people,” said Mace Vaughan, the director of the pollinator and agriculture biodiversity programme at the Xerces Society, an insect conservation organisation. “They’re like a hub in a wheel supporting identification, training, research, data sharing.”
The lab has provided data for more than 800 papers over the last 20 years. It receives and identifies bees from universities and hobbyists alike. It takes the time to write identification manuals and run the sort of tests that Droege quips “will not get you tenure”, such as: Which brand of soap works best in a bee trap?
“Many people who have come through my lab have either been directly trained in bee identification by Sam Droege or have used his lab’s expertise to verify species IDs,” said Scott McArt, who heads a pollinator lab at Cornell and is an assistant professor of pollinator health in the university’s department of entomology.
Identifying a bee is no small feat. Most species are tinier than a grain of rice. But under the microscope, wonders appear. There’s hair length, pattern and colour; there’s the size and shape of their antennas; each wing has a cobweb of veins with distinctive angles, shapes and locations.
“Oh, a nomada!” Droege exclaimed as he peered into the lens. “Beautiful. Nest parasites of other bees. Incredibly hard to identify.”
He looks at samples from across the country, but sometimes the best discoveries can be in his own backyard. A recent visit to a landfill in Washington yielded two rare finds: a stelis labiata and a hylaeus fedorica, neither of which have ever been recorded in the District or Maryland.
The possible closing of the lab comes at a critical moment for one of the world’s most important pollinators.
Honeybee keepers reported losing over 60% of colonies in the past year, according to Project Apis m., a honeybee research nongovernmental organisation. Most honeybees are farmed for their honey and shuttled across the country each year to pollinate different crops, adding $18 billion in annual revenue, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
The deaths have been in part linked to viruses known to be carried by Varroa mites, a common honeybee parasite, according to research the USDA published in June. The mites appeared resistant to a common miticide, “underscoring the urgent need for new control strategies for this parasite”, the scientists wrote. They noted that pesticide exposure and a lack of food have also played a role in the decline.
Since honeybees are farmed and bred for profit, their population and behaviour is easier to track than wild bees. It’s also a telling indicator.
“Honeybee decline is often the canary in the coal mine for all pollinators, specifically native bees,” Vaughan said. “Pesticide exposure, loss of habitat, all these things affect both honeybees and native bees.”
Native bees – which are not affected by the mites – are disappearing, said Droege, in part because every road, building, home and lawn we build gets rid of bee habitats. These drops in population are harder to monitor in the wild. More than 50% of the native bee species that have enough data to track are in decline, according to a 2017 report from the Center for Biological Diversity. Increasing temperatures have contributed to bumblebee population decline in North America and Europe, according to a 2020 study published in the journal Science. Vaughan said that research projects looking into these trends can get significant support from the bee lab’s data.
Humans tend to be oblivious to the role they play in the fate of bees, Droege said.
“The bee world we inhabit, while critical to a functioning planet, is completely opaque to the citizenry,” he added. “Despite the fact that they are surrounded by native bees.”
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