Response mechanisms to heat stress in bees

Abstract

Bees are vitally important in natural and agricultural ecosystems, providing key pollination services to wild plants and crops. Increasing reports of regional declines of bee populations have attracted intense attention worldwide. Challenges to bee health are multifactorial and include poor nutrition, heat stress, agrochemicals, and pathogens. The impact of heat stress is a relatively minor factor in current bee declines compared with agrochemicals and pathogens. However, heat stress has adverse impacts on foraging activity, pollination services, task-related physiology, immunocompetence, reproductive capacity, growth, and development of bees, and these adverse impacts are variable in different bee species. Heat stress-related damage to bees receives extra attention when it is accompanied by climate change. Heat-tolerance mechanisms are key enablers for bee survival under hightemperature stress conditions, and we now understand that both behavior and molecular regulation strongly impact the ability of bees to reduce damage from heat stress. In this review, we summarize and synthesize previous findings about the detrimental effects of heat stress to bees and discuss the strategies bees use to cope with heat stress. Bee species mentioned here are mainly honeybees, bumblebees, and stingless bees, with a focus on the honeybee Apis mellifera .bees / population decline / heat stress / climate change / defense strategies

Comparative transcriptome analysis of adult worker bees under short-term heat stress

“…Global warming and the pollination of greenhouse crops result in honeybee exposure to heat stress. Honeybees face many adverse effects of heat stress (Medina et al, 2020;Zhao et al, 2021). Ambient temperature can greatly affect foraging activity (Al-Qarni, 2006;Blazyte-Cereskiene et al, 2010), then affect crop pollination.…”

Linking Histone Methylation States and hsp Transcriptional Regulation in Thermo-Tolerant and Thermo-Susceptible A. mellifera L. Subspecies in Response to Heat Stress

“…Therefore, the honeybee colony of A. mellifera has been viewed as a super-organism and a model for functional homoeothermic insects [ 12 , 16 , 19 , 20 ]. Still, more investigations are required to better understand heat-resistance mechanisms of honeybees [ 17 , 21 ].…”

Forest restoration treatments indirectly diversify pollination networks via floral‐ and temperature‐mediated effects

“…For example, thinnings that create canopy gaps can increase floral densities and species richness (Rhoades et al, 2018) by freeing growing space and allowing more sunlight to reach the understory. This can also result in higher understory temperatures (Forrester et al, 2012), and thermal conditions are known to regulate bee foraging behaviors (Heinrich, 1974; Schmaranzer & Stabentheiner, 1988; Zhao et al, 2021). In addition, thinning may result in the addition or removal of coarse woody debris to the understory and changes in ground cover; both woody debris and bare ground (exposed soil) are important predictors of bee nesting success (Gelles et al, 2022), and shifts in their availability could impact site occupancy by bee taxa.…”