Will Peterson, a writer, photographer, and self-described ‘bee nerd’ has the entomologist world buzzing these days.

Last summer in the Puget Sound region of Washington, Peterson espied a rare Western bumblebee. The Western bumblebee had effectively disappeared from the face of the Earth during the 1990s. The stark population decline baffled scientists for years, with many hypotheses about the cause of the decline, but without many answers.

However, when Peterson spotted the ‘six-legged Bigfoot,’ as he calls the bug, it was not an optical illusion: soon, other citizen scientists across America began to send in their own reports of Western bumblebee sightings.

Western bumblebees are vital to the economy, as they are the main pollinators of plants such as tomatoes, cranberries, and blueberries. In 2006, a USDA survey revealed the Western bumblebee had vanished from more than 30 percent of its natural range, and was particularly absent from the Northwest territories west of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountain ranges.

Peterson and a group of volunteers have subsequently confirmed active colonies in four locations throughout Washington: near Everett, Lynnwood, Tacoma and on the Olympic Peninsula.

His next mission is to document a more thorough population census of the Bombus occidentalis and figure out whether or not the Western bumblebee has evolved resistance to the disease that potentially could have caused the tumultuous population decline in the early 1990s.

Peterson has drummed up support from the University of California, Davis, the US Department of Agriculture, and through an online crowd sourcing campaign. Currently, Peterson has raised enough money to sponsor an expedition this summer into Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and several more of the Rocky Mountains states to search for the elusive insect.

Volunteers will not only count the number of specimens and document their locations, but also collect DNA samples for study. The DNA tests, which will be performed for free by the USDA’s Bee Biology and Systematics Lab in Utah, may reveal genetic shifts in the species or characteristics that have allowed some of the remaining populations to survive while others have been decimated.

The goal is to gather DNA across a wide geographic range and look for changes that might be affecting the bees’ survival rates. Previous USDA studies found that after the population crashed, Western bumblebees appeared to lose much of their genetic diversity.

“We’d like to know how these populations are related, how much diversity there is within these populations,” said Robbin Thorp, University of California, Davis entomologist. “The genetic studies [Peterson] is proposing are really fundamental to those kinds of questions.”

The study comes at a time when much national focus has been turned to the current state of bee populations in America. Just last week President Obama announced the creation of the ‘Pollinator Health Task Force‘ in an effort to mitigate the rampant decline of native pollinators as well as stem further cases of colony collapse disorder among commercially used honeybees.