Climate change can make bumblebees wake up too early and die - study


This is just another prophecy about a future that may never come -- and which ignores adaptation. If there is survival value in waking up later, bees which wake up later will dominate. There are around 2,000 bee species in North America and if one species gets into trouble, others will move into any vacant ecological niche



The effects of climate change could be devastating for bumblebees, as altered seasonal weather changes could cause the bees to wake up from hibernation early, a new study has found.

The findings of this study were published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Biological Conservation and present some stinging news regarding the damage climate change can wreck on bumblebees and, by extension, global agriculture.

Bumblebees may not be producers of honey like their more popular cousins, the honeybees, but they serve an extremely important role in the ecosystem as being pollinators.

Pollenating is necessary for the spread of many types of plants. As such, they play a major role in agriculture, as well as food production, with a large percentage of food crops relying on bee pollination.

Bumblebees hibernate during the winter and wake up during the spring. This is important because they will have access to pollen and nectar from plants for food to survive.

But what if bumblebees wake up too early? Unfortunately, the odds don't look too good for them, as they won't have access to the food they need without spring flowers.

And with climate change, that's going to be a bigger issue.

The researchers behind the study at the University of Ottawa in Canada were able to study the variations in when different bumblebee species emerged from hibernation.

This was done by going through databases of different bees in museum collections throughout North America.

The factor that seemed to link these early bumblebee emergences was the climate. This is because climate change can possibly lead to an early start to spring, which would make the bumblebees wake up before the food is available.

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