Dr. Paul Goldstein did not get stung by a bee last summer. That’s unremarkable unless you account for the fact that he tried to catch every kind of bee on the Island, bagging some 10,000 samples.

“Many bees don’t sting or if they do they have stingers that are so flimsy and little they couldn’t penetrate your skin,” he said. “In general this is not a hazardous practice.”

But it is an important one as a dawning comprehension among scientists and agriculturalists has emerged in the past decade about the critical importance of native pollinator species and of their precipitous decline.

“We know that a lot of bumblebee species in the region are in a lot of trouble and that they’ve sort of fallen off,” he said. “In many cases we don’t necessarily know why.”

Although the scourge of colony collapse disorder on industrial honeybee populations has been well-documented (if poorly explained) the crisis facing native pollinators has been more subtle, if equally alarming.

“In New England in general but on the Vineyard in particular where we have small, diverse farms a lot of the heavy lifting for pollination actually falls to the native bees,” Mr. Goldstein said. “Honeybees are great but they can’t pollinate tomatoes, for example, or squash, or a host of other things that have their own bees.”

Mr. Goldstein, who works at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and concedes that he is “really more of a moth guy,” is leading an effort by The Trustees of Reservations to document the Island’s rich native pollinator diversity, along with Russ Hopping of the Trustees and a handful of plucky Vineyard volunteers. In the results of the inventory, which was funded through a grant from the Edey Foundation, Mr. Goldstein finds cause both for hope and for concern. He will present those results tomorrow at the Wakeman Center at 2 p.m.

Before scientists can evaluate the scope of the pollinator crisis they needed to establish a baseline of data on current populations. For Mr. Goldstein that meant that his team had to first collect the bees, and lots of them.

“When we started this a year ago we had records of about 14 or 13 species of bees from the Island,” he said laughing. “Embarassingly, after decades of working out there nobody had gone out and systematically looked at which bees actually occurred here. Now we’re at 133 species and counting. That’s approaching 40 per cent of what’s known for Massachusetts.”

Although he had access to some of the most state-of-the-art archiving, labeling, database and geo-referencing technology available through the American Museum of Natural History in New York, to collect his specimens Mr. Goldstein first had to rely in large part on the time-tested tools of the entomologist.

“There are a lot of things that you’re only going to get if you go out there with a net and really go old school,” he said. Besides the archetypal net-swinging scientist, the Trustees team also employed a technique affectionately known as “bee-bowling.” Mr. Goldstein explained:

“You get these little plastic cups like the kind you’d get coleslaw in, paint them flourescent yellow and flourescent blue, fill them with soapy water and lay them out in lines,” he said. “When you retrieve them in a day or two you basically have this bee soup.”

He added: “That’s the easy part. It’s once you’ve got this refrigerator that’s full of 150 bags of bees that the hard work starts.”

Next Mr. Goldstein had to oversee a sort of mass funeral parlor for the buzz-kills.

“This is where it gets kind of funny,” he said. “They basically have to be washed and blow-dried because by the time they make it onto a pin to be looked at under a microscope, they have to be all puffed up and fuzzy.”

One of the primped-up specimens from the Vineyard survey was the Anthophera Walshii, a species of long-tongued digger bee that had not been seen in the northeastern United States since the 1970s. Mr. Goldstein netted the lone digger bee alighting on a patch of wild indigo in the State Forest. The return of the bee was a welcome surprise but still sobering for Mr. Goldstein.

“Here we did this intensive sample where we have literally 10,000 bees and we only got one,” he said. “It makes you wonder, if I had hiccuped wrong that day and gone to a different spot we wouldn’t have got it at all.”

On the other hand, the rusty-patched bumblebee, which had flourished at Long Point and in Gay Head as recently as the early 1990s was nowhere to be found last summer.

“We knew this thing was there, it was one of our targets,” he said. “We didn’t get it.”

While the worldwide decline of honeybees has been blamed on everything from pesticides to infection to cell phone towers, Mr. Goldstein said the decline of our native pollinators may be a family affair.

“My default answer is almost always habitat loss or habitat fragmentation for these sorts of things,” he said. “But in this case we believe that exotic bumblebees that were brought in for greenhouse pollination may have brought in a disease that spread to the wild bumblebees.”

The pollinator crisis, Mr. Goldstein argues, is not a pet cause isolated to a only a few branches of the insect kingdom, and alarming only to a handful of specialists. Instead, he said, its widespread effects may only be beginning to come to light.

“One of the reasons people are concerned about this is because we have this pairing up between pollinators and their host plants — something like 68 per cent of our native flora in Massachusetts is animal or insect pollinated,” he said. “What people are afraid of is this cascade. When biological systems collapse they tend to do so very quickly.”