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.
I always thought that male bees mating with “orchids” was funny.
How did the bees & orchids manage to survive the Medieval, Roman & Minoan Warm Periods, the Holocene Climatic Optimum, the Eemian & previous warmer than now interglacials & the whole balmy Cenozoic prior to the Pleistocene, let alone the torrid Cretaceous, if the co-evolutionary relationship goes back that far, as well it might?
My question exactly, milodonharlani. Also: polar bears, migrating birds and all the other species reportedly threatened by so-called global warming.
I’m a King Bee baby, buzz all around your… orchid?
Hey! This paper is the bee’s knees!
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, from the Urban Dictionary:
” Bee’s Knees
A old term that means cool.
‘Thats the Bee’s Knees'”
(Bold mine.)
If you have to explain it, it probably missed the target 🙂
it is quite amazing that researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) were actually paid money to waste their time n this sort of daft nonsense.
…or, were willing to attach their name to it.
Yeah, a research botanist at the Royal Botanical gardens who’s interested in orchids researching the pollination strategy of an orchid, how strange!
I’m in the wrong effin business. Anyone want to create a ridiculous study with me to secure some grant money? I wonder if my Obama Care covers lobotomies so I can attain the necessary intellect to proceed.
Every tight symbiotic relationship evolved over millions of years. Indeed plants and animals do not lways respond precisely to any given weather, but it they are truly dependent on each other, they have found ways to adapt to weather changes that happened over the past and much warmer millions of years. The repeated attempts to portray nature as fragile and incapable of responding to natural climate change, is bogus science.
It’s not only bogus science, it diverts attention from any actual problems that the species may be experiencing such as habitat destruction, weeds or introduced pathogens. Habitat destruction, at least, can be halted or reversed, but if they are all going to die because of climate change, then why bother?
Just consider the climatic ups & downs that bees & orchids have weathered, so to speak, over the past 100 million years, to include periods of more rapid change than now.
It is observed in New Zealand that on a nice, warm Spring day there is increased activity by male shepherds to ‘rescue a young ewe from the fence’. It is further observed that the male shepherds tend to avoid females ( and vice versa from the females detecting a scent other than a pheromone) for some time after the rescue. The rescue act causes seed to be spent unproductively rather than reproductively. Ewes learn mistakenly from the interaction and so are inclined (p<0.001) to later reject copulation attempts of the ram as non-natural.
Thus, with more nice, warm Spring days, the populations of both the shepherds and the sheep is forecast to decline, faster even than the rate of migration to Bondi.
A potential remedy would be to progressively replace sheep with camel farming. There is prior knowledge of camel behaviour in historic observations, such as this (1) –
The Sexual life of the camel,
Is stranger than anyone thinks.
This weird and mysterious animal,
Has designs on the hole of the sphinx.
But the hole of the sphinx is covered
By the shifting sands of the Nile,
Which explains the hump on the camel
And the sphinx's inscrutable smile.
Too frequently here, my plum and cherry trees blossom before the bees leave their hives.
I’d conclude this as evidence of global cooling here, but some past winters some of the plum trees blossomed in January, and I caught one last month sprouting some new leaves and blossoms (without shedding its old leaves) after our first rain of the season. So far this Fall we haven’t had frost or cold enough weather (30 mi south of San Francisco) for some of the fruit trees to get their needed rest, but that will probably start in December or January.
If not, shall we blame it on global warming? /sarc/
It’s agriculture that would mostly be affected by climate change.
Yep, they opened their mouths……and put their feet straight in them. Instead of adding weight to their stance, they have devalued it. Own Goal.
I thought all of the worker bees were already female.
Only the drone is male.
So, there will be no warm Springs now and then if we stop climate from changing? They imply that climate needs to stop changing by insisting that weather needs to stop being weather.
I’m loving “slutty flowers”
I’m sure it’s been said already, but worker bees are all females. There only a few males, the drones, whose sole purpose is the impregnate the queens. Any bee gathering pollen is a female.
Yes many posters have made the same error as you have in assuming that these are honeybees and despite multiple posts correcting that error more keep coming.
ROFL
(Of course creatures may get confused by unusual weather, but they adapt to slow change.
More unscientific blather from the University of Any Angle to Promote Our Agenda. I would blush to be writing such drivel in an alleged “institute of higher learning.” I’d feel compelled to wear glasses with a fake nose and mustache in public.
It has long been known that some species of the ophrys orchid family, widespread in Europe, attract males by mimicking the scent and appearance of females. I wrote a short article on this in 1999, referring to the early spider orchid (ophrys sphegodes) – nothing new, just an observation at a good site.
Pollination of that orchid is usually low and variable, dependent on the emergence of the miner bees, suggesting that there has always been a discrepancy between flowering and the appearance of the bees, depending on the annual climate. I don’t think that there is any evidence of a long-term change to that pattern.
The clever old bee orchid (ophrys apifera) manages pollination all by itself, the pollinia stalk bends forward to touch the stigma.