GRANTS PASS, Ore. —  A conservation group filed a petition Wednesday to add a bumblebee from Southern Oregon and Northern California to the endangered species list.

The Society for Invertebrate Conservation and University of California at Davis entomologist Robbin Thorp formally petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the insect – called a Franklin’s bumblebee – under the Endangered Species Act.

Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the of the Xerces Society in Portland, said the petition is part of an effort to reverse the decline of bumblebees and other native bees around the world due to habitat loss, pesticides and diseases spilling out of commercial greenhouses.

The group is preparing petitions to protect other bumblebee species as well. The Franklin’s bee was chosen for this petition because documentation of its decline is more detailed than for other species. Thorp found 94 Franklin’s bumblebees in 1994, but he has seen none since 2006.

Farmers often hire honeybee keepers to pollinate crops, but hives have been decimated by a mysterious honeybee killer known as colony collapse disorder.

So some farmers are turning to bumblebees to pollinate, especially for hothouse crops such as tomatoes, peppers and strawberries, and field crops such as blueberries, cranberries, raspberries, squash and watermelon. Bumblebees pollinate about 15 percent of all crops grown in the nation, worth $3 billion.