Research based at Bowling Green State University is examining at how climate change is affecting bees.
Teams of researchers are studying many species of bees in 10 cities across the country to see how urban heat affects the bees.
Those cities are Tucson and Phoenix in Arizona, Fort Collins and Denver in Colorado, Athens and Atlanta in Georgia, Raleigh and Durham in North Carolina, Detroit in Michigan, and Toledo in Ohio.
“A big part of our research is to measure the limits of these bees. How much heating up can they tolerate before they succumb to that heating and how much dehydration can they tolerate before they succumb to dehydration,” asked Kevin McCluney, associate professor of biological sciences at Bowling Green State.
In the arid west and in the Southeast, bees are stressed to their limits by heat. But that’s not true everywhere.
“Bees in northern cities like Detroit and Toledo are not very close to their temperature limits, so they do not seem to be sort of at risk from overheating.”
But a lack of moisture is a problem for bees across the board.
“It seems like dehydration is a pressing issue everywhere, including in Toledo and Detroit for certain species.”
To mitigate those stresses, McCluney said people can plant native wildflowers and provide nesting habitat for different species of bees.
He said these are preliminary results. The team of researchers is still processing samples and figuring out some of the data, said McCluney — there are 4,000 species of bees nationwide, and not all react to heat the same way.
