The study found “vanishingly low levels of attention to pollinator population topics” over several decades, even compared with what many would consider the limited coverage of climate change.

The study, titled “No buzz for bees,” was led by Scott Althaus, the director of the U. of I. Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, and May Berenbaum, a leading expert on pollinator declines, head of Illinois’ entomology department and one of three editors of the PNAS special issue.

The research utilized the Cline Center’s Global News Index, a unique database of millions of news items from thousands of global news sources, published over decades.

“No study like this, and certainly not at this scale, has ever been done before,” said Althaus, also an expert on news coverage and its effects. “There simply has not been academic research on the evolving nature of news coverage given to pollinator declines, despite the importance of that topic within the scientific community.”