Only hardier species can adapt to global warming
Story submitted by Eric Worrall
Another claim that its worse than we thought – this time warmer temperatures are killing the bees.
According to Scott Groom, PhD student at Flinders University, mathematical modelling has connected changes in bee populations over the past 20,000 years across the South Pacific region, and exceptionally large declines in bee populations, with changes in temperature.
Groom says that prior to the ice age when temperatures rose, many bee species migrated to cooler areas, with only one hardy species able to adapt to the warmer temperature.
“They’re almost canaries in the coal mine, you can see that they’re going to be the first sort of species to be impacted by changes in climate,” Groom said.
The study, “Parallel responses of bees to Pleistocene climate change in three isolated archipelagos of the southwestern Pacific” can be found at the link below.
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1785/20133293.abstract
Abstract
The impacts of glacial cycles on the geographical distribution and size of populations have been explored for numerous terrestrial and marine taxa. However, most studies have focused on high latitudes, with only a few focused on the response of biota to the last glacial maximum (LGM) in equatorial regions. Here, we examine how population sizes of key bee fauna in the southwest Pacific archipelagos of Fiji, Vanuatu and Samoa have fluctuated over the Quaternary. We show that all three island faunas suffered massive population declines, roughly corresponding in time to the LGM, followed by rapid expansion post-LGM. Our data therefore suggest that Pleistocene climate change has had major impacts across a very broad tropical region. While other studies indicate widespread Holarctic effects of the LGM, our data suggest a much wider range of latitudes, extending to the tropics, where these climate change repercussions were important. As key pollinators, the inferred changes in these bee faunas may have been critical in the development of the diverse Pacific island flora. The magnitude of these responses indicates future climate change scenarios may have alarming consequences for Pacific island systems involving pollinator-dependent plant communities and agricultural crops.
I don’t have access to the full text, so I don’t know whether other possible causes of population crashes, such as bee killing Varroa mites, were considered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varroa .
Varroa mites were originally discovered in Asia, but have since spread worldwide. Some bees are resistant to Varroa mites, because they have evolved hygiene behaviour, which removes and kills the mites.
Here’s hoping it wipes out those killer bees. The author of this article was likely pushing that story a few years ago.
I stopped reading after, ” … mathematical modelling … “
I remember being in West Timor discharging petrol and paraffin, and there was a wild bee colony on the little cliff just a few hundred yards from the dock. The local youths made pocket money from climbing the cliff and gathering the honey. We bought some and it was the sweetest thing we’ve ever tasted, although we had to filter out the bees feet that came in the honey. Well, you never know how often the bees washed their feet.
West Timor is not a cold place.
My son is a beekeeper in Rhode Island. This past winter killed off his hive. ‘Nuff said.
do a TV series about bees dying, and see how many watch.
There is such a thing as alarm overload (crying wolf), and the threshhold of response is raised, necessitating a higher level of alarm. Ho will they achieve that, because we are at alarm saturation already.
Why have “local” and “pocket money” suddenly turned blue?
Honey bees are a European import. The Native Americans saw honey bees as a sign that the White Man was closing in on their lands. The loss of honey bees in North America would return that part of the ecology to how it was pre-occupation/invasion (PC thinking, right?).
The perfect climate, the perfect environment, the perfect ecology, was the one you had before you were old enough to recognize the negatives.
For the love of God. Why don’t these clowns make it easy on themselves and us by just tell us what climate change WON’T affect.
It is indeed “worse than we thought” (TM).
Clear case of “find something that’s already happening”, “attribute it to my cause”, and prove your cause is true by letting nature run its course.
Well, no shortage of theories, most of them anti-human.
May vary with location.
But last I heard the most plausible causes of substantial deaths in North America were parasites.
Antidotes included squeaky clean housekeeping (bee keepers tend to just re-use hives without cleaning, some went away from plastic parts for reasons I did not grasp) and taking extra steps to avoid exposure to chemicals (to minimize stress on bees thus maximize their own resistance to parasites).
A large proportion of beehives are moved around to pollinate different crops at the optimum time, such as fruit orchards. Farmers can coordinate with Beekeepers to spray chemicals when bees are elsewhere.
Even static hives can be somewhat protected by only spraying in calm conditions, often at dawn, that’s done for general reasons anyway, bee exposure is then only from contact with flowers. (I don’t know when spraying is needed, if at other than flowering time then contact exposure will be minimal as bees will be visiting other fields at the time.)
This forum may have old articles on that.
What? South Pacific islands, and no mention of bees drowning because of rising sea level?
As with other such scary claims, the obvious question is: how did the bees not succumb to warmer temperatures in the past? And why is it that only future temperature increases, and not those of the past hundred fifty years, will kill them off?
Gee, I wondered how the bees coped in the Eemian interglacial, 125,000 years ago, when average temperatures in the tropical zone was 2 C higher than it is today.
Fiji, Vanuatu and Samoa…which have the highest rates of agro-deforestation
“Only hardier species can adapt to global warming”
Maybe so. When it hit 13F in Seattle in early February after a warm January, the majority of the native pollinators in my yard were wiped out. Fortunately a hive of native bees survived under the eaves of my shed or I would have spent the spring in the orchard with a paintbrush!
Time to invest in Honey Futures…..the kids ain’t gonna know what a bee looks like.
So let me review, shall we? 1) They can accurately count bees over the past 20k years. 2) They can accurately determine temps in placed w/o ice cores and stuff for the last 20k years. 3) There were variations in temps, large ones, all before human activity.
Only one of those I can believe… and I’m pretty sure I’m not looking at it in the way the author would hope?
Another classic example of “let’s get funding for something we wish to study by tying it to Global Warming.”
My bees like warm weather much better than cold weather. I lost a hive this past, very cold, winter, but beekeepers who live far north of me successfully overwinter bees. One of the regular speakers at our beekeepers association is an entomologist at the University of Kansas who studies tropical bee colonies in South America and Africa, where bees seem to do just fine.
http://acsh.org/2014/02/bee-bee-behind-bee-colony-collapse-one/
“In this piece, author Shawn Regan, a research fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana drops a data bombshell from a USDA report — bee colonies are just fine”
To Paraphrase Robert Armstrong (as Carl Denham in “King Kong”, 1933): “Oh no, it wasn’t the climate. It was mathematical modeling killed the bees.”
Ah whatever…
maybe they can add this to the list of things that are used to strip you of your private property rights ; and that does include intellectual property. hint hint, wink wink.
“ACSH’s Dr. Josh Bloom comments, “Along with many other folks not deeply involved in this subject,I just assumed , based on the widespread media reports, that there were serious problems with bees dying en masse. Indeed, just being outside in the spring seemed to reinforce this. It sure looked like there were fewer bees around in the last few years. Or were my observations colored by the news? I guess, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, this explanation is at least as plausible as any of the others. Maybe more so.”
Honey bees are busy in my garden and don’t mind that I work beside them. There are many species of bees and pollinators in my garden, along with many predatory insects, including Red Wasps. The wasps and I continue a truce of some years, as they live in a small hole in my workshop wall and come out each Spring to prey on Tomato Hornworms and the like. They don’t whack me and I don’t whack them (fingers crossed.) They are a very curious species, as every time I bring in a new flat of plants, or materials to expand the beds, or any tools or anything new, really, they fly around closely inspecting the new presence in their world. Their behavior makes me think that there is far more intelligence and memory possessed by such small creatures than we know.
I wonder how Mr.Bombus polaris feels about all this.