Climate change is making it too hot for bumblebees to adapt, threatening their existence

5 comments

1. No matter, they’ll die from glyphosate poisoning (or at least heavily weaken and _then_ die from Varroa), lack of native and usable flowers, and uncrossable fields of tarmac and concrete anyway.

2. I think it’s good to get wider-scale perspectives on this issue, but at the end of the day, the most power you have to affect change is on a local scale. Talk to anyone on r/NoLawns or r/meadowscaping who has transformed their grass into a diverse field of native plants and flowers. It doesn’t take a ton of effort for the bees to flourish.

   There is certainly room for action on wider scales. But I fear these articles can easily lead to an unhelpful kind of globalist paralysis.

3. Correction: “Climate change is making it too hot for bumblebees to adapt, threatening theirs, **the environment, and humanity’s** existence.

4. God, I don’t want to live in a world where I will never again get to see a bumblebee. I don’t want to wake up one day and have that realization that they’re gone forever.

5. Hm, so my close friend is a bumblebee scientist studying native bumblebees in the mid-atlantic, and all his data show that even on the hottest weeks of the past several hottest years, nest temperatures never rose above the point where the bees could not survive. Though, as temperatures climb, they do need to engage in fanning behavior more often to keep cool, which may reduce the amount of time they can spend foraging, thus slightly reducing fitness. Presumably this study is looking at different species that are less tolerant of heat, though the linked article doesn’t specify.