Bees, flowers wilted by climate change

Claire Oglivie in the Montreal Gazette (Canada): Honey bees and the flowers they feed off are being stung by climate change. New Canadian research suggests that climate change may be causing some flowers to open before bees wake up from hibernation. That means the bees are missing out on some early nectar and the flowers aren't getting pollinated.

"Scientists have raised the idea that one aspect of climate change would be this decoupling-in-time of species that interact," said James Thomson, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto. "It could be predators getting decoupled from their prey, it could be plants getting decoupled from insects that attack them or insects that serve them, like pollinators. My interpretation is that it is probably that kind of phenomenon."

Thomson has just completed a 17-year study in Colorado of the wild lily and the bumble bee, which pollinates it. "My paper is the first that has actually looked at it from the plant side and documented that here is a plant population for which the pollination is actually getting worse," he said.

"I don't think the bees are discomforted by this disconnect, but I think the flowers are, and I think there is almost certainly a measurable reduction in seed production. We would expect over the long run that this would have some population consequences for the plants."…

Bombus lucorum shot by kallerna, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license