Bees squeezed by warming

Bumblebee ranges are shrinking as the world warms, suggesting that climate change is yet another factor threatening the pollinators.

A team led by Jeremy Kerr at the University of Ottawa, Canada, collated more than 420,000 observations of bumblebee species from North America and Europe between 1975 and 2010. They found that as temperatures rose, the southern limits of many bumblebee species' ranges moved north, by as much as 300 kilometres in some cases. But the northern edges of the bees' ranges stayed in place, leading to an overall contraction of the insects' habitats.

Neither pesticide usage nor changes in land use correlated with the observed shifts in the bumblebee ranges.

Nature 523, 259 (16 July 2015) doi:10.1038/523259a
Published online 15 July 2015

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