-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email Despite being essential to sustaining agriculture and the health of ecosystems, bee populations are rapidly collapsing because of human activity. First, a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids was definitively linked to this dangerous decline. Now, as revealed in a recent study in the journal Ecology Letters, climate change is another human-caused environmental factor hurting bees.
To learn this, the authors analyzed a long-term dataset of North American bumblebee species as their populations rose and fell in correlation with the community temperature index (CTI), a measure of the balance of warm-and cool-adapted species in a community. Related We have no idea if pesticide protections for bees actually work — a serious issue for conservation "We document a substantial shift in the functional composition of bumblebee communities that is tied to a long-term increase of summer temperatures in North America," the authors write. While many species are able to track human-caused alterations in the climate, "cold-adapted species appear to lack the adaptive capacity to cope with rapidly climbing temperatures and are being lost from bumblebee communities across the continent.
" Further research needs to be conducted to learn about how climate change impacts bumblebee populations on the community level, yet their research finds that the insects' loss "is having a significant, negative impact on many important pollinating insect species wit.