Wild bees as winners and losers: Relative impacts of landscape composition, quality, and climate

Abstract

Wild bees, like many other taxa, are threatened by land‐use and climate change, which, in turn, jeopardizes pollination of crops and wild plants. Understanding how land‐use and climate factors interact is critical to predicting and managing pollinator populations and ensuring adequate pollination services, but most studies have evaluated either land‐use or climate effects, not both. Furthermore, bee species are incredibly variable, spanning an array of behavioral, physiological, and life‐history traits that can increase or decrease resilience to land‐use or climate change. Thus, there are likely bee species that benefit, while others suffer, from changing climate and land use, but few studies have documented taxon‐specific trends. To address these critical knowledge gaps, we analyzed a long‐term dataset of wild bee occurrences from Maryland, Delaware, and Washington DC, USA, examining how different bee genera and functional groups respond to landscape composition, quality, and climate factors. Despite a large body of literature documenting land‐use effects on wild bees, in this study, climate factors emerged as the main drivers of wild‐bee abundance and richness. For wild‐bee communities in spring and summer/fall, temperature and precipitation were more important predictors than landscape composition, landscape quality, or topography. However, relationships varied substantially between wild‐bee genera and functional groups. In the Northeast USA, past trends and future predictions show a changing climate with warmer winters, more intense precipitation in winter and spring, and longer growing seasons with higher maximum temperatures. In almost all of our analyses, these conditions were associated with lower abundance of wild bees. Wild‐bee richness results were more mixed, including neutral and positive relationships with predicted temperature and precipitation patterns. Thus, in this region and undoubtedly more broadly, changing climate poses a significant threat to wild‐bee communities.

A biophysical approach to assess weather impacts on honey bee colony winter mortality

“…Main flight time of four important bumblebee species in Europe extends with higher temperatures [49]. Kammerer et al [50] studied wild-bee abundance in the Mid-Atlantic United States. They found that some wild-bee species show neutral and positive relationships with predicted climate patterns.…”

[Retracted] Green Space Planning and Landscape Sustainable Design in Smart Cities considering Public Green Space Demands of Different Formats

“…Various plants in the park can provide diversified habitats for animals and help increase the capacity of green carbon sinks. Compatible ecological service functions can meet perceived needs and provide life support features [23]. In the meantime, rational use of natural elements, such as light, wind, and water, reduces resources and energy consumption [24,25].…”

Bee foraging preferences, microbiota and pathogens revealed by direct shotgun metagenomics of honey

“…Exposure to non-lethal doses of pesticides alters the composition of bee microbial gut community, metabolic homeostasis and is likely to affect the gut microbiota-brain axis, with detrimental individual neurological effects, which collectively disrupt colony function (6,(15)(16)(17)(18)(19). In parallel to these pressures on pollinators, the current climate crisis is likely to exacerbate their effects over the coming years (20)(21)(22)(23). The challenge of building resilient food production systems while maintaining plant biodiversity and ecosystem stability necessitates the coordination of international biomonitoring strategies in order to comprehensively capture the multifactorial nature of threats to honeybee health (24,25).…”