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June 28 (UPI) – Over the last half decade, nearly one-third of the North American bee population has disappeared. New research suggests that in parts of the United States, bee populations continue to decline.
To better understand how global warming is affecting the health of bees, scientists from Northwestern University and the Chicago Botanic Garden have exhibited bee nests in Arizona. at a variety of temperatures. The researchers modified the temperatures by painting the nests in black, white and clear.
The black painting caused the nests to absorb more of the solar energy, reproducing the future climate of the region if temperatures continued to rise. Black paint has effectively changed rapidly to the climate of the 2040s to 2099.
White paint has caused the heat of beehives, bringing bees back in time to climatic conditions similar to those observed in the 1950s. worked as a control.
"It's pretty low-tech, but it works," Northwestern researcher Paul CaraDonna said in a press release. "The site is so remote that something more high-tech with solar panels or a source of energy was out of the question."
The study included 90 nests in the Santa Catalina Mountains in Arizona, where bees continue to thrive. All nests were inhabited by a native species known as the Mason Bee, Osmia ribifloris also called Mason Bee.
Scientists have replicated the experiment twice, observing consecutive seasons. Each season, researchers found that bees in black nests suffered increased mortality rates and that they had emerged early from diapause over a longer period of time. Diapause is a term that describes the hibernation of insects
Normally, bees wake up from diapause for 10 to 15 days, but bees developing and hibernating in warmer conditions have emerged from the diapause on a period of 50 days. This suggests that they respond to a stressful environment, "said CaraDonna.Because their time of emergence is altered, they have potentially fewer floral resources available to them as a population, and it can be a lot more difficult to find partners.
Bees emerging from black nests were also smaller body fat.Scientists hypothesized that higher temperatures accelerated the metabolism of bees during diapause.
"For insects, size is a major problem," said CaraDonna. "The bigger it is, the better it is, it means you have more energy reserves, which means essentially means you can cope with more storms. "As a bee, this means that you can probably reproduce more, which affects the stability of the population.] A new study – published this week in the journal Functional Ecology – suggests that climate change may start to push some species of bees against their physiological limits.
It is likely that bee populations will move to warmer higher elevations, but migration would leave native manzanita plants without their usual pollinator.
"This mason bee is probably one of the best pollinators for this plant species, so if you remove the pollinator, you could take the plant into the longer term," CaraDonna said. "We need to understand how nature works and see how it reacts to important sources of variation, otherwise we can not keep it safe."
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