Eric Worrall writes: At the University of East Anglia (UEA), the place that gave us Climategate, researchers have discovered climate change affects the ability of bees to pollinate a rare orchid which mimics a female bee in order to attract the attention of pollinators. Apparently warm weather causes bees to emerge early, before the flowers, therefore the bees get buzzy with each other, rather than being distracted by bee mimicking flowers. From this finding, the researchers extrapolate the progressive breakdown of all pollination systems, therefore we must shut down industrial civilization.
According to The Register;
“… where the climate was found to be warmer in the early stages of Spring, bees were sleepily wrapping their fuzzy bodies around their female counterparts, even though the orchids had already flowered, the scientists said. … There will be progressive disruption of pollination systems with climatic warming, which could lead to the breakdown of coevolved interactions between species because they either respond either to different seasonal cues, or to the same cues at different rates.”
What can I say – the compelling conclusion of this study can only be disputed if you refuse to believe that happy, well satisfied bees are a sign of the end times.
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Nothing wrong with a little sugar now and again, honey.
what we have here is a classical error in logic.
males bees find more female bees when there are less flowers mimicking female bees. do tell captain obvious.
however, this doesn’t mean that when the flowers appear the males bees won’t have their way with them as well.
http://www.earthlife.net/insects/solbees.html
What if we turn the argument around?
Doesn’t warm weather mean that female bees will be more likely to find males, as the males won’t be off shagging the slutty flowers? And therefore there will be more bees next year?
So warming will lead to more bees and it is this increase in bee numbers that will keep the flowers satisfied, leading to an increase in flowers as well. all due to warming.
I thought worker bees were all female. Are they saying that global warming causes lesbeeanism?
Harold, they are. But some climate scientists don’t let the facts get in the way of a story.
Like it :))
Good one Harold……;^D
Not true of the species of bee in question. Most species are not eusocial, like the honey bees. Most of the important pollinating species are in the group of solitary bees.
An example of solitary bees is the common ‘bumble bee’. (Thanks for the intro DesertYote)
“Scientific name: Ophrys apifera Huds.
Common name: bee orchid”
From the ineffable and incomparable Kew Gardens .
Bolding, mine.
Besides the minor fact that orchids are quite patient and there will always be more bees, I assume the UEA is attempting to jump on the paranoia NGO apiary bandwagon to get more funds no matter what lies they tell.
UEA is drama queening and holding their collective breaths for too long (the loss of brain cells due to lack of oxygen and an abundance of personal CO2 contributes to more wrong weather and climate predictions).
Ha ha! Well yes, that was my first thought. And these people think they are scientists.
FWIW….for weeks now, as various trees and bushes have flowered we have had masses of bees visiting them. The sound of the buzzing has been almost deafening. Ash trees, oak trees, camellias, crab apple, all loved by swarms of bees. This is Spring in North Central Victoria.
Where do they get all the little overalls then?
GROOOOAAANNNNN. Made me smile.
I just want to know: WHAT global warming?
Oh the irony, it burns. Two-hundredth of a hive might be males. Vastly all bees must, according to UEA. lesbian? “Breakdown of coevolved interaction” sounds like a rehash (oops) of the evils of cannabis.
Bee careful. It’s not about worker bees. It’s about the few male bees attempting to mate with an orchid thereby spreading their pollen.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.10.033
But as I observed down thread for every “1 °C increase in mean spring temperature was associated with an advance in flowering of 6.7 days”, which is 13.4 days early flowering for a 2C rise in mean spring temps. Maybe the folks at UEA should find themselves something better to do.
No Jim, this jerk actually thinks male and female bees are like human teenagers chasing each other around the fields in spring time. A stunning level of ignorance.
Drones screw the queen, who does not leave the hive. He also seems to have totally misunderstood the lure of the orchid.
From the Register:
I have to say why male bees want to copulate with female worker bees is a bit baffling.
This paper is in Cell , which probably explains a lot.
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2814%2901342-6
The abstract talks about the male bees being involved in “pseudocopulation” with the orchids. This sounds like more bad science.
The lure of the orchid is probably just that of a worker bee. Any insect seeing what it believes to be congener on a plant will assume it is a source of food check it out.
I use a similar technique with sticky fly-paper. traps which I always prime with a dead fly to attract others.
It seems that there is some rather naive anthropomorphic assumptions going on in this “pseudocopulation” storey.
Ah, apparently these bees are solitary variete, not a social species and do not have a worker caste.
http://www.habitas.org.uk/priority/species.asp?item=9636
Still the proposition that the orchid “could be” in danger due to few days drift in the coming out period is belied by the fact that this symbiosis has evolved in the first place in an ever changing climate system.
This is just more of banal CAGW “could be” speculation that gets passed off and published as science in these so-called “prestigious” journals these days.
Well, mentioning that the orchids also bloom earlier would be counter-narrative. One needs to cherry pick the data and the facts to keep the CAGW train on track.
This gets better. Apparently there is a chemical signal in the females once mated. So if all the females have their coming out parties a bit earlier, by the time the orchids flower there will be lots sex starved males out, desperately looking for a good time.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs002650000241#page-1
Looks like the orchids patches are going to get a hammering on Saturday nights “as the climate continues to warm”. ™
I think Greg’s last comment (12:43 pm) in this string captures the important information. The Ophrys sphegodes orchids rely on tricking male bees using visual and scent cues into thinking their flowers are females ready for a date. The orchid is widely distributed and attracts different species of solitary bees (Andrena) in different areas and is known to have highly variable scents such that within an area male bees can learn which flowers they have already ‘pseudocopulated’ and look for other unmated flowers, thus maintaining male interest and promoting outcrossing.
So, there seems lots of genetic variation on hand to allow the orchid to fine tune to any slight changes in temperature or pollinators. After all, the orchid has a wide distribution today and must have survived previous glacial and interglacial periods of the current Ice Age. Orchids mass their pollen into a single lump and produce vast numbers of tiny seeds from a single successful pollination, so any successful variant is likely to spread – if there is suitable habitat. The real threat to Ophrys sphegodes is habitat destruction.
This paper is just another beat-up attempting to collect high impact factor kudos and generate scare headlines by waving the climate change bloody shirt. Highly specific pollinator systems as with this orchid (and many others) are potentially fragile, but not likely to temperature changes that their ancestors have already cruised through in the past. If you are interested in protecting orchids, then maintaining appropriate habitat for the orchid and its pollinators is what you should be worried about.
Please enlighten us all: What’s added to the water pipe lines in University of East Anglia?
Long ago Chalmers in Gothenburg begged Pripps, a Gothenburg-Beer company, for a direct pipe line…..
Have UEA been more successful? 🙂
You’re probably blaming the wrong sort of pipes, nyuk nyuk nyuk…
Damn, lost my lighter!
Might have been a mix of drinking and smoking…..
Maybe if we check their oral health we’ll find evidence of Meth…
Wow… birds a few days ago, now bees… and don’t forget the plight of the Monarch Butterfly! Next it will be “all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small” (posthumous apologies to John Rutter).
What comes to mind is k.i.s.s. – but now it’s k.i.s.a.s.s. (Keep It Simple And Sufficiently Scary).
Kiss my a$$ is what comes to my mind. These must be the most incompetent bio-climate-ology idits in the world (in a Jeremy Clarkson voice)
That’s ‘idjits’.
Some springs are cold and rainy and some are warm and dry. I dont see how an increase by 2 degrees is a game changer. My apple trees and the bees would surely not complain. Just another bogus theory that will never amount to anything
Hahahahahah. Vely good
IIRC, the bee “pollen collectors” are all female. The males are few, and all drones – another word for “parasitic loafer”. They don’t do work…
I’m starting to get really amused at the creative idiocy that is Warm-ism. Next week we’ll be assured that teenage acne will worsen with rising temperatures. Poor kids…
Hey! evidence of a welfare system in nature… that may just impact my view of society.
A beek, a beekeeper, knows when his hives are toughening up for winter for the dead drones pitched out the front door as too expensive to keep and feed through the winter.
The bees in question are not honey bees. They are a species of solitary bee. Most of the important pollinators are solitary bees.
Good point.
The dumbness of this paper relates to the interaction of orchid and bee and how it supposedly is so fragile; there is no evidence for that.
A lot of comments (including mine) have been distracted by the partial knowledge of honey bees that we possess. My mistake. Thank you.
Climastrologists are learning about the Birds and the Bees. It’s a good sign. Climate science may survive it’s adolescence.
Money was actually spent on this? Really?
These people need to get laid!
Under a train.
The more claptrap the warmists spew out the less they are believed, let them spew it out in heaps.
All I know is that my son’s two hives did not make it through last winter in Rhode Island due to to cold.
As a bee keeper I get used to lots of tosh and idiotic statements. However the one that bugs me most is the oft repeated line supposedly by Einstein that the human race would quickly die out if bees disappeared. The idiots who say this never seem to realise that huge amounts of crops are not pollinated by bees ( ever see bees pollinating wheat?) and that there were no honey bees in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and other places before Europeans took them there, in spite of this their indigenous peoples seem to grow or collect food without too much problem. The reality is that beetles,flies and moths are just as likely to pollinate flowers as bees are. Bees can be a signal that all is not well in an environment, but only if we learn the realities of bee husbandry and not believe in silly stories.
You forgot bats and other small mammals (small marsupials are quite important pollinators in Australia)
Don’t forget the wind.
And the aqueduct…….oops, sorry, wrong movie.
Hi Gareth – you are correct about wind pollination of grains etc. and alternative pollinators, but when ‘bees’ are mentioned, most people assume the honey bee is meant. That is not true in this paper. I don’t know if any orchid is regularly pollinated by honey bees, but I do know that orchid pollination systems tend to be very complicated and often rely on a limited number of pollinator species, usually flies, moths or solitary bees.
There are about 25,000 species of bees in the world. The vast majority of these are wild solitary bees that we hardly notice, but do just fine as pollinators of native plants and many crops. A few of these have been domesticated for special use, e.g. pollinating alfalfa (honey bees are very poor pollinators in lucerne). Leaf cutting bees and bumble bees (which are social, but form small colonies) are excellent buzz-pollinators of tomatoes, capsicum, and blueberries and there is a lot of ‘background pollination’ of our crops by non-honey bees.
If all honey bees died out, then fruit and vegetable production would drop, but we would still survive and probably develop new bee partners to fill the void. Maybe Einstein meant all the world’s bees including the wild ones, but more likely he never said anything that dumb.
In the Arctic mosquitoes pollinate flowers. Have you seen the size of them?
Gareth, you’re right about the statement. Plenty of different bee species here in mid-Atlantic US.
Thing is, many of the commercial fruit/vegetables/nuts are of European origin and may not be so attractive to native pollinators, but beloved by honeybees.
Just to add for an interesting observation, I have a fall-blooming Chinese elm planted on my lot, and honeybees go absolutely crazy collecting pollen from it in Sept/Oct — the whole tree is buzzing. Not something one would expect from an elm…
Beyond stupid. All pollen gathering worker bees are female. Saddest part is this passed pal review. Vivid example of junk climate science.
Good news. It is now apparent that many warmunists (derivation in Blowing Smoke courtesy Vclav Klaus and Blue Planet in Green Chains) do not understand ‘the birds and the bees’. So there will eventually be fewer of them.
Yes, but Ophrys orchids fool male insects into trying to copulate with them and thus pollinate them. They do this by both looking and smelling like females. Quite sneaky flowers really.
Hi Rud – I agree that this probably passed as pal review or at least confirmation bias prevented a good review, but they have the pollination system correct. Male bees don’t collection pollen, but most species do visit flowers and can act as pollinators from pollen sticking to their furry bodies. In the case of orchids, the plants actively stick a large mass of pollen (called a pollineum) on the males and then retrieve the mass when the male visits the next flower. This strategy seems to be very effecting even with rare pollination events as about 10% of living vascular plant species are thought to be orchids and about a third of them have truly bizarre pollination systems. Given your eclectic interests, you may find this page interesting:
http://biology-assets.anu.edu.au/hosted_sites/orchid_pollination/
This is so dumb I couldn’t be bothered to discuss it at the Guardian. But if you want a better laugh look at the comments over there.
Such ignorance is astounding. For instance this gem.
mdfrancis (06 November 2014 6:23pm):
With the most lauded expert reply from SteB1 (06 November 2014 7:30pm):
One wonders how long he believes the reproductive cycle and lifespan of a bee lasts.
Now: what will really happen?
In a warmer world, the orchids that flower later will be pollinated in preference to those that flower early. A strain of the orchid that flowers later will therefore develop as long as the bees behave consistently.
Who’d have thought it? Evolution in action.
Let’s build a model and prove that models can match prediction… or maybe just make a hat. (oh, forgive my Sunday sarcasm)
Oh, come on. What latitude range do bees live in? Do they change their behavior for every 2 deg. of average temperature?
Yes they do. As you get closer to the equator the bees get hornier. That is why all plant life is concentrated at the poles.
It’s not known as the University of Easy Access for nothing, and it is renowned for it s creative writing department.
You can add the Universities of Kent and of Sussex to the list of UINO’s* – co-authors of the paper.
*Universities in name only
Is UINO’s pronounced “Ween-o’s? LOL
If the planet was really that fragile we wouldn’t be here now.
If the bees emerge early due to warmer spring temps, then would the orchid flower early also? Here is a paper from 2010.
Here is the paper summary of the WUWT post from University of East Anglia (UEA). They seem to be saying that even if the orchid flower early they will find the female bees are also out. Does anyone know how many days early the male bees came out early? If it’s 13 days or more then they will find the orchids have flowered I think according to my earlier post upstream. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2745.2010.01727.x/full
If the paper is correct, then logically this little tease evolved since the Younger Dryas, unless some other hand was involved.
Apparently an excessive interest in pseudocopulation makes you go blind (to historical facts).
Apparently warm weather causes bees to emerge early, before the flowers
That struck me as well, the bees can tell it is warmer but the plants cannot??!
+1
Honey, I’m home…
Warm weather brings out the beekinis
The irony here is that in the UK Ophrys sphegodes is only found in Dorset, Hampshire, Kent and Sussex not in East Anglia. Moreover it is much more common in the Mediterranean and middle east. Last time I was there it was considerably warmer in Tehran than Norwich. One wonders how the bees in the Middle East managed to cope.
Globally averaged, pseudocopulation takes behind closed doors. You observation proves there are more closed doors in Tehran than in Norwich.
Biologists, being a step or two away from the science of global warming, tend to just believe in it. It fits their world view that people and all they do is bad – this is simply biology 101. They aren’t equipped, nor would they be inclined to if they were, to argue the physics. Their job is to seek out the effect on living systems which they do diligently. ‘Seek and you shall find’ if you try hard enough.
Especially helpful and fruitful is knowing how to rationalize ignoring pesky confounding observations or simply seeking in the ‘right place’. This is leftish biology 201. The now down-in-the-dumps UK butterfly expert did this, for example in selecting a logged off area in Nevada to find extirpation of a butterfly whose local habitat had been destroyed (temporarily). Within easy view of the logged off area, the pretty little critters were flapping and gamboling away in large numbers. As far as she knew as a mere biologist, the logging off was caused by global warming anyway.
Is Jim Steele the only objective biologist there is, or the only one visiting WUWT. WUWT?
Yeah, but the bee paper has all the right buzzwords.