Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Apparently painting bee boxes black, to “simulate a warmer, future climate”, results in higher mortality and greater stress. But the study authors appear to have overlooked another effect of painting the boxes black.
Climate change linked to potential population decline in bees
Study finds that warmer temperatures push bees to their physiological limits, may drive local extinction
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
PUBLIC RELEASE: 28-JUN-2018Study finds that warmer temperatures push bees to their physiological limits, may drive local extinction
EVANSTON, Ill. — A new study from Northwestern University and the Chicago Botanic Garden has found that climate change may drive local extinction of mason bees in Arizona and other naturally warm climates.
In a two-year, in situ field experiment that altered the temperature of the bees’ nests to simulate a warmer, future climate, 35 percent of bees died in the first year and 70 percent died in the second year. This is compared to a 1-2 percent mortality rate in the control group.
“The projected temperatures appear to be pushing this species up against its physiological limits,” said Northwestern’s Paul CaraDonna, who led the research. “This is evidence that we might see local extinction in the warmer parts of this species’ range, which is pretty sobering.”
…
To study how climate change affects mason bees, CaraDonna’s team set up three types of nesting environments in Arizona’s Santa Catalina Mountains, where the bees thrive. The team manipulated the temperatures of the nests by painting them to simulate past, present and future climates. The team painted a third of the nests black to absorb more radiant heat, thus simulating a future climate predicted for the years 2040 to 2099. By painting another third with a white, reflective, cooling treatment, the team sent that third of the nests back in time to a climate similar to that of the 1950s. As a control, the team painted the final third nests with a transparent paint, leaving their natural wood color for a control group. The experiment included 90 nests total, each housing anywhere from 2 to 15 bees.
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Read more: https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-06/nu-ccl062618.php
The abstract of the study;
Experimental warming in the field delays phenology and reduces body mass, fat content and survival: Implications for the persistence of a pollinator under climate change
Paul J. CaraDonna James L. Cunningham Amy M. Iler
First published: 27 June 2018
- Climate change is rapidly altering thermal environments across the globe. The effects of increased temperatures in already warm environments may be particularly strong because organisms are likely to be near their thermal safety margins, with limited tolerance to additional heat stress.
- We conduct an in situ field experiment over 2 years to investigate the direct effects of temperature change on an early‐season solitary bee in a warm, arid region of the Southwestern USA. Our field experiment manipulates the thermal environment of Osmia ribifloris (Megachilidae) from larval development through adult emergence, simulating both previous cooler (c. 1950; nest boxes painted white) and future warmer (2040–2099; nest boxes painted black) climate conditions. In each year, we measure adult emergence phenology, linear body size, body mass, fat content and survival.
- Bees in the warming treatment exhibit delayed emergence phenology and a substantial increase in phenological variance. Increases in temperature also lead to reductions in body mass and fat content. Whereas bees in the cooling and control treatments experience negligible amounts of mortality, bees in the warming treatment experience 30%–75% mortality.
- Our findings indicate that temperature changes that have occurred since c. 1950 have likely had relatively weak and non‐negative effects, but predicted warmer temperatures create a high stress thermal environment for O. ribifloris. Later and more variable emergence dates under warming likely compromise phenological synchrony with floral resources and the ability of individuals to find mates. The consequences of phenological asynchrony, combined with reductions in body mass and fat content, will likely impose fitness reductions for surviving bees. Combined with high rates of mortality, our results suggest that O. ribifloris may face local extinction in the warmer parts of its range within the century under climate change.
- Temperature increases in already warm ecosystems can have substantial consequences for key components of life history, physiology and survival. Our study provides an important example of how the responses of ectothermic insects to temperature increases in already warm environments may be insufficient to mitigate the negative consequences of future climate change.
Read more: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1365-2435.13151
Reading the full text, the scientists gathered nests and put them in their painted boxes.
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Our experiment has four stages: collection of newly completed nests from unmanipulated nest boxes and transfer to experimental nest boxes; exposure to experimental temperature treatments in the field from April until emergence in the following year; monitoring emergence phenology; and collection of emergent bees and postprocessing in the laboratory to measure adult body size and fat content.
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The warming treatment consisted of nest boxes painted with flat black acrylic latex‐based paint (Figure 2); because a black surface absorbs more radiant energy, this treatment warms internal nest temperatures. The control treatment consisted of identical nest boxes painted with a transparent acrylic paint (Figure 2); these resemble the unmanipulated nest boxes placed in the wild nearby. The cooling treatment differed between the 2 years of the experiment, although treatment effects were similar (see Section 3).
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Aside from the absurd suggestion that a slight range shift is a serious enough problem to warrant the term “local extinction”, there is another curiosity which caught my attention.
The team seem to have logged daily maximum temperature inside the boxes, but I didn’t see any attention to daily minimum temperature. Painting the boxes black would have caused higher maximum temperatures from absorption of sunlight in the daytime, but the black painted boxes would also have radiated heat faster at night.
So it seems possible that much of the damage to the bees in the black boxes was caused by colder night time temperatures, rather than warmer daytime temperatures.
The Tucson, Arizona region where the experiment was conducted experiences some cold nights most of the year, with an average of 26.4 days per year where temperatures dip below freezing in Tucson, likely even more cold nights in the nearby Santa Catalina Mountains where the experiment was conducted.
Update (EW): The issue of whether black paint would enhance night time cooling is not as clear cut as I thought.
Consider the following study
Effect of exterior surface colour on the thermal performance of buildings
The effect of external surface colour on the thermal behaviour of a building has been studied experimentally as well as theoretically. Experiments were performed on scaled down units of 1 m3 volume, under different conditions; namely (i) completely tight building, (ii) effect of opening the door and (iii) of an overhang on the window for complete shading throughout the day. A computer simulation programme, based on periodic solution of the heat conduction equation, was developed to yield the time variation of the room temperature corresponding to the given meteorological parameters. As expected, the black painted enclosure recorded a maximum of 7°C higher temperature than the corresponding white painted enclosure during hours of maximum solar radiation, while during the night the two enclosures showed nearly the same temperatures (being the light weight constructions). The experimentally observed temperature meaasurements were quite consistent with the theoretical calculations within experimental accuracies (±2°C). The same software when used to simulate the behaviour of a normal sized heavy structure, predicted 4°C to 8°C higher temperature throughout a period of 24 hours for a black coloured surface than the corresponding white one.
Read more: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/036013239290005A
Does this apply to the bee experiment? It may do – the boxes look lightly constructed – they might have rapidly achieved thermal equilibrium regardless of the colour of the paint. On the other hand, the bees normally nest in protected cavities which might offer at least some thermal insulation.
Osmia females typically nest in narrow gaps and naturally occurring tubular cavities.[1] Commonly this means hollow twigs, but can be in abandoned nests of wood-boring beetles or carpenter bees, in snail shells, under bark, or in other small protected cavities.[4] They do not excavate their own nests. The material used for the cell can be clay, mud, grit, or chewed plant tissue. The palearctic species O. avosetta is one of a few species known for lining the nest burrows with flower petals.[5] A female might inspect several potential nests before settling in.
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_bee
Were these insulated cavities preserved when the nests were collected? Does any thermal insulation provided by the preserved nest material matter? How does contact with the black painted surfaces in the “global warming” boxes affect the nest insulation?
The paint pigment might also influence the thermal properties of the box. According to industry literature carbon black, iron oxide black or copper chromite black are standard black pigments for most formulations, but they have very low infrared reflectivity and a TSR of about 6%. But some “black” paints have additives like Titanium oxides which are very reflective in the infrared spectrum, pigments which keep the dark painted structure cooler in daytime but which might also affect thermal emission at night.
It would have been nice to see the minimum temperatures recorded by those temperature loggers in the study, to check these concerns either way.
No *%!@ur momisugly!
What next, will Paul J. CaraDonna, James L. Cunningham and Amy M. Iler be conducting “Summertime” Global Warming Survival Testing on young children, 1 to 3 year old, by placing them in locked vehicles of different colors that have been parked in the “hot” Arizona Sunshine.
Stephanie : I agree……NOW go and wash your mouth out !!! Naughty Girl !!
.
ps……It seems that this kind of ‘NONSENSICAL SCIENCE’ will increase in future
as there are lots of desperate STUDENTS trying to obtain subject matter for
a degree of some sort !
IT WOULD HAVE “BEEn” A LOT better if they had looked at some method of
control or eradication of VARROA MITE
http://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2018-06-29/varroa-mite-detected-in-melbourne/9923972
I’d be kicking their butts hard!
utter bloody fools!
so the bees made normal sited nests and these twits moved them to “prove”
jackschitt
the bees are way smarter than they could ever aspire to be.
if temps rose then the bees would take that into acct and site their new hive accordingly
all thes mongrels have done is kill bees that are already low pop and struggling.
iIwork with bees helping a mate and this makes me wildly angry
I’ve seen crud like this vefore
uni students going out in large groups to “monitor” butterfly pops
meanwhile killing many- damaging sites they were in and trashing the area generally smashing around like the gormless fools they and their greentinged tutor all were!
the endangering comes FROM the enviro whackos
banning beekeepers from established sites in Nat parks so they can run orienteering groups through- who do little good- but “might be endangered by the bees”
and dont even pay for use as the apiarists do
meanwhile the bush doesnt get pollinated as well.
Yes, this is the most pathetic attempt at “simulating future climate” . Firstly, only the box is hotter during the day. The outside remains the same. This means the animals get a thermal shock whenever they enter or leave. As cold blooded creatures, how does that affect them? It may also affect when they chose to go out, only to get surprised by the conditions.
This is just brain dead pseudo-science.
Any half competent peer reviewer would point out these flaws and recommend non publication.
” Later and more variable emergence dates under warming likely compromise phenological synchrony with floral resources ”
So screwing around the bee’s habitation in an unchanged local environment is not going affect their phenological synchrony ??
They even point out the flaws in their own method but don’t even notice.
Nests of 2 to 9 bees? Hardly established colonies.
One has to read the paper to realize they are cooking the bees as well. From their experiment one must conclude that they believe the future temperature would be 10 °C warmer during the day. That’s a whopping difference.
Why not simply observe established bee colonies in different climes to determine if temperature had any effect?
What is the toxicity of the black paint to insects?
They’re abusing native bees, not the honeybee.
Native bees are solitary bees, but they will use a common dwelling site. Their nests are narrow holes which gardeners emulate with large straws under a rain cover.
These bees tend to naturally nest in shadier places, often with thick thermal walls around their nest holes.
These yahoos transplanting and forced cooking solitary bees is intentionally cruel in the cause of anti-science.
Their picture shows three tubes. Native bees usually nest with their specific nest open to the atmosphere. Nests under house eaves or within structures accessible by vents is not similar to constrained environments where air movement is choked off, is antithetical to native bee nests.
These nuts are not conducting science.
Flunk those students for abusing wildlife through sheer arrogant ignorance.
Reminds me of when alarmist greenies were yakking about the frogs dying because of human activity, and it turned out they were right. It was the researches themselves carrying and spreading the destructive Chytrid fungus around the world as they intruded into the environment of the at-risk frogs and amphibians. And thus proving themselves to be the very harbingers of illness and death that they claimed to be.
I, once, in the UK, transported 90K bees in my brand spanking new 1994 “M” reg Land Rover Discovery form somewhere in Hampshire to a friend’s farm in Cornwall. Three hives all different colours, can’t recall them. But I do recall they were not uniform in colour, they were all different.
The bees survived the trip, but a battle ensued once placed and opened with local populations, and a staggering number were either killed in territory “battles” or were dead on arrival and ejected from the hives.
For the past about 25 years my hives have been painted Navy Blue (dark blue) which is close to black. They thrive.
I realize the study is of Mason Bees so things may be different, but I agree that it is a dumb study that fits well into “conformational bias”.
Bill:
Honey bees easily nest in very unlikely spots, including dark bark hollow trees.
Honey bees actively control ventilation to keep their hive temperatures controlled. Mason bees, or native bees, do not.
It is impossible for native bees to control their ventilation.
https://www.bing.com/th?id=OIP.LflRn5n9PoulyLyz4nspRQHaEA&w=299&h=162&c=7&o=5&dpr=1.75&pid=1.7
Here is a front view to a nest placed for native bees. (Native bees, Osmia are not unique to North America! They’re worldwide bees.)
As a counter example; here is a vent in a honeybee hive. The bees close the vent in winter and open the vent in summer with hive workers circulating air.
Your last sentence nails the alleged study.
WordPress apparently refuses to recognize an image’s link, so I placed it as an active link within “bees close the vent…”
My apologies.
Very sensibly, Bee-Keepers usually paint their hives white. Honey bees are not picky about the color of their hives, however bees do not like paint on the inside of their hive.
Most hives are white, as white is good in warmer climates where the lighter colours will reflect daytime light and heat, and reduce heat loss at night, which the bees will like
Bees have enough problems to combat withou being subjected to insane theories of theirfuture extinction by Warmist Grant Seekers .
My guess is they painted them black…and cooked them
The researchers were aware, were they not, that bees have QUITE DIFFERENT COLOUR VISION to humans? They can see, for instance, in the ultraviolet, and they make extensive use of this colour vision in their daily tasks of searching out nectar-bearing flowers and returning to the hive.
I don’t know what the effects of a different coloured hive would be, but the bees would certainly have noticed it, and that effect needs to be determined before any further experiment.
I would simply have heated the hive walls with a hot pad. Less obtrusive and more controllable…
Yes I was thinking black might be a very unnatural colour for their hive.
Perhaps it may have an effect on how easily the foragers can locate the entrance,
which would effect the hive health in general
“By painting another third with a white, reflective, cooling treatment, the team sent that third of the nests back in time to a climate similar to that of the 1950s”
What does “climate similar to that of the 1950s” mean?
How can a coat of paint recreate all the parameters that make up climate?
How do these studies get past peer review?
is a “non-negative” result a positive result?
Does that mean that the white painted hives did worse than the hives that were not painted at all?
In other words, temperatures from the 1950s were not as good for bees as temperatures today. That shouldn’t be a surprise if bees have adapted or evolved as temperatures have risen (have they in Arizona?) but the researchers seem remarkably coy about it?
Just how much hotter is a black nest internally? 2, 4, 10 C warmer? The fact bees live at the tropics and temperate zones shows how adaptable they are.
More immature science if you ask me.
When Honeybee hives get too warm on the inside, ……. the bees will set-up a “fan brigade” to cool the hive down.
Not in this study they wouldn’t. There isn’t enough bees to set up a fan brigade or cluster and “vibrate” together to generate enough heat to survive during cold weather.
So, Darrin, ….. iffen there is any cool/cold temps during the Spring or Summer ……. then all the bees die and the species goes extinct.
Brilliant conclusion, Darrin, just wonderful.
So Sam, go read the report again. Hive sizes from 2-15 bees each…not a lot of bees to modify hive temperature.
All these morons had to do was interview a group of apiarists – people who know more about bees than these “researchers” will ever know. But the apiarists don’t have degrees in bees, so anything they say is just – what? Hearsay? Bogus? Chitchat? Anecdotal?
Maybe if these “researchers” quit interfering and let Nature handle things, any “problems” (which they create) will resolve themselves. Oh, wait – what am I saying? They’d be out of grant money! Sorry. My bad.
Sara, your comment reminds of a federal fisheries management public workshop I attended. The stated purpose was to get opinions from expert commercial fishermen. After a presentation by a government scientist fishermen started telling them why it wouldn’t work. After about the tenth captain, the technocrat was obviously getting angry and stood up and told the audience that the captains could not possibly know what they were talking about since they were all uneducated, at best the information they were providing was anecdotal. One of the captains then stood up and asked ‘have any of you at the front table ever been to sea?’ After sputtering a bit the answer was NO. Three of the captains in the room had PhDs in marine science, several other master degrees. Why they were doing research? They hated university and were never going to work for the government.
One of the greatest oxymorons in science is “anecdotal data.” It may not be as common as it once was, close to as dumb as I have heard like–“You can’t do science in a bucket.” I would like to know the effect of satellites, remote systems and ease of computer models on marine science. Even before then self-selection kept some from the sea. Ever see someone in the Navy get seasick? It happens.
These tools are great, but you still need to go to sea to solve the questions. Some realize this and still do, but may be lumped with those that don’t. Some of the better biologists came from commercial fishing families.
WHAT THE LIVING—NO !!!!@ur momisugly@@ur momisugly@@ur momisugly@@ur momisugly!!!!!
Anthony, what would your work on the surface station project indicate the difference in temperatures would be for the different shades of box? I’d have thought that they would have put a temperature probe and data logger in each box to track the changes.
Wrong. Colors (white or black) does not matter when it comes to IR radiations. Nature of the surface does (shiny, mate…).
Yes, the visible color may have little or no relationship to the reflectance in IR or UV. Green leaves have a red fluorescence spike and high reflectance in NIR. This ‘research’ is little better than a middle-school science project.
My limited experience of these bees is that they like sheltered locations for their nest sites (I have a bundle of cardboard tubes which are under the eaves of my garden shed) they each use one nest site and don’t form colonies as such, so taking them from where they had chosen to nest and putting them out in the open would in my view be akin to leaving your dog in a closed car on a sunny day.
Also as you point out,
So it seems possible that much of the damage to the bees in the black boxes was caused by colder night time temperatures, rather than warmer daytime temperatures.
(honey bees huddle together for warmth “solitary” bees find this a bit harder)
The nests were probably in a fairly sheltered location to start with but were then put in the open as the bees would not nest where conditions were not good for them.
In this they show more intelligence than those studying them!!!!
James Bull
“So it seems possible that much of the damage to the bees in the black boxes was caused by colder night time temperatures,”
“NAH”, most any bee species that can survive the winter cold ….. can survive cool summer nights.
Bees are quite capable of “airconditioning” their hives – they can even generate enough heat to kill invasive predators by surrounding and “cooking” them.
Before opening a relocated hive, beekeepers listen to the sound is it “angry” or just “airconditioning” – don’t open an angry hive.
A black hive would certainly require they spend more energy on cooling in the daytime and warming of a night.
I’m guessing the fresh paint fumes were a bigger problem.
The whole thing sounds like a pile of preconception.
So they’ve proved the local heat island effect.
They’ve also proved that the bees are smarter than the researchers, as the bees are smart enough to make their nests in the shade.
My beehives were white, and I would wrap my hives in tarpaper in the winter so what sun we’d get would warm them a bit. Black is good.
Hmmm, so what’s next? Hey, I know, let’s
torturetest some whales by putting them in an acid, warm bath, to “simulate” future conditions of the oceans! Yeah, that’s the ticket.Yep. Make sure you pick Minke whales because they go great BBQ’d and finished with grated puffin.
Poor experiment design.
Cook the bees now, and get it over with. Yeah! That makes a lotta sense.
If that is science then I wouldn’t make a scientist’s arse hole.
Doing some simple scaling on their plot of maximum temperatures gives the following:
Highest temperature in control hive: 41.3°C
Highest temperature in black box: 47.5°C
Don’t know much about bees, but 47.5° is hotter than I’ve ever experienced, and might come close to killing me if I couldn’t get relief.
Eric’s conclusions have merit. I would also suggest that the black boxes would have not just caused the night time temperatures to be lower but dramatically increased the temperature range from day to night.
Also, I remember a little experiment with bees in South America that got out of hand. African bees were being crossed with European bees. If I remember correctly the cross, among other things, was far more temperature tolerant that European honey bees.
It seems there is a continual desire to explain away poor hive maintenance leading to hive collapse than improving the education of some bee keepers.
Not more temperature-tolerant. Less cold-tolerant. Which is why Africanized bees haven’t yet invaded all of North America, and are stalled somewhere along boundary of winters that get below around 20F.
Baking bees in their hives should be a tremendous success.
And a crime. Has PETA been informed?
“In a two-year, in situ field experiment that altered the temperature of the bees’ nests to simulate a warmer, future climate, 35 percent of bees died in the first year and 70 percent died in the second year. This is compared to a 1-2 percent mortality rate in the control group.”
Doesn’t this indicate that the normal life span for bees is 50 to 100 years? I’d be skeptical if someone told me that. What is the normal lifespan for a bee? I’d be willing to bet that in any group mortality is more than 1 to 2%.
Average lifespan for a Mason Bee is 4~6 weeks. Honey Bees ~ 17.5 weeks.
Piss poor experiment!
Cheers from Not Yet Warm Montana!
This is a ridiculously bad design of experiment.