How does climate change impact social bees and bee sociality?

Abstract

1.Climatic factors are known to mediate the expression of social behaviors. Likewise, variation in social behavior can dictate climate responses. Understanding interactions between climate and sociality is crucial for predicting impacts of climate change on animal populations. 2.These effects are particularly relevant for taxa like bees that exhibit a broad diversity of social states. An emerging body of literature aims to quantify bee responses to environmental change with respect to variation in key functional traits, including sociality. Additionally, decades of research on environmental drivers of social evolution may prove fruitful for predicting shifts in the costs and benefits of social strategies under climate change. 3.In this review, we explore these findings to ask two interconnected questions: (a) how does sociality impact vulnerability to climate change, and (b) how might climate change impact social organization in bees? In doing so, we generate predictions about the impacts of climate change on the expression and distribution of social phenotypes in bees. Furthermore, we emphasize that social and solitary bee populations could be differentially impacted by climate change due to important behavioral, physiological, and life history differences.4. We highlight important avenues for investigating evolutionary consequences of climate change for social bees and for bee social organization. Understanding linkages between social behavior and environmental conditions is essential for forecasting vulnerability and resilience to climate change across bee taxa.

Toward a functional trait approach to bee ecology

“…Sociality is another predictor of ecological patterns in bees, both because of its role in shaping fitness outcomes and environmental interactions, and because of the sheer diversity of social forms in bees (Michener, 1974;Wcislo and Fewell, 2017). Social bees may be more resilient than solitary bees to some forms of environmental change, due to advantages of communication strategies, resource sharing, and social behavioral thermoregulation (Ostwald et al, 2023). Defining the lexicon to describe bee sociality has been ongoing and contentious endeavor (Costa and Fitzgerald, 1996;Dew et al, 2016;Richards, 2019;Wcislo, 2005Wcislo, , 1997.…”

Social conditions facilitate water conservation in a solitary bee

“…Particularly for soil-nesting species, these effects may be exacerbated by increased drought under climate change, which is causing rapid drying of soils in many regions [21]. These shifts in water availability and predictability will likely have profound but poorly understood consequences for animal social organization and social evolution [22,23].…”