Posted on 11/08/2014 7:24:15 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
Anyone with a basic knowledge of how ecosystems work knows how important the role of the humble bee is.
But a study suggests that climate change may be making male bees too easily distracted by females to bother carrying out pollination.
According to research by the University of East Anglia, warmer springs have resulted in both bees and flowers emerging earlier than usual, meaning they do not coincide with each other.
This means that by the time the flowers bloom, the bees are too busy mating with females to help fertilise plants.
‘Warming by as little as 2C causes the males to emerge much earlier, meaning they are less well synchronised with the orchids,’ said lead researcher Anthony Davy, from the university’s school of biological sciences.
‘The problem is compounded by the female bees which are also emerging earlier, and attracting the attention of the male bees.
‘This means that the male bees are more likely to copulate with the female bees, rather than pollinating the orchids.’
(Excerpt) Read more at metro.co.uk ...
Warmer earlier in the year? Not less cold in winter or more warm any other time, just earlier spring? And this is caused by fossil fuel use? So the flowers adjust to the temp, but bees are stuck with tiny hive calendars, so they can’t handle any change?
Yes, but you are missing out on the male rape/war on women side of the story. The science is settled on that topic too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_(bee)
Male bees are called drones. Their only function is to fertilize the queen. Kids learn this in grade school or at least they used to.
Climate change ate my baby!
“Male” bees don’t pollinate flowers, they just hang around the bee hive and fertilize the queen. The bees that pollinate the flowers are neuter.
> climate change may be making male bees too easily distracted by females to bother carrying out pollination
Huh. That’s odd, since in commercial beekeeping only ONE male mates with the ONLY reproducing female in the hive, the rest being DRONES and WORKERS.
Amd if they’re talking about the Orchard Mason bee, then they’re really full of crap.
Same university that was at the center of the email scandal a while back. Got caught colluding on falsifying research. They have less than zero credibility.
So basically everyone is just running around getting it on and not getting it done. Global warming caused the Clinton White House, iow.
Every time some phenomena occurs in nature, like bees having more sex, the hot airheads immediately link it to climate change, and adjust all theories to support their supposition. It gets in the way of real science, and real reasons why things happen. ...The guys doing real science can’t get any grant money.
I thought the worker bees were undeveloped females, genetically?
What the hell.. i was taught that all worker bees were sterile females. That the hive did not produce as males except when need to reproduce an then once he did his one job he died off... or am i thinking ants
Evolution; They are doing it RIGHT...
NOT exactly correct.
True that male bees (drones) do no pollination. But they do not mate with their own queen. Thus they fly several miles away from their own hive to mate with a queen from another hive. A queen will only have one mating flight and from that stores the sperm that will last her the rest of her life. So you can see that the chances of a particular drone being the lucky (?) guy to get to mate is unlikely. Only a few of them get lucky and then die doing it. So there are not many drones produced in the hive. The queen actually controls how many drones are made. All the other bees are female and all the females except the queen are worker bees. These workers are NOT neuter . They are true females. Sometimes if the queen of the hive dies and the hive has none of her eggs at the right stage to raise one as a new queen, then a few of the workers will mate and lay eggs as an attempt to revive the hive. These worker laid eggs are not successful though so this attempt never really works properly.
Nice try-—But a Male BEE is called a DRONE. They do not collect pollen. They stay in the hive and pork the queen. The worker bees are genetically FEMALE but do not mature to egg laying status until they are fed “Royal Honey” and then activate their ovaries. Somebody needs to tell the author about the Birds and the Bees!!!
If a hive loses its queen, some of the worker bees will start to lay eggs. But because the eggs haven’t been fertilized, they hatch into drones—which does the dying hive no good.
In a healthy hive, the drones are driven out in the fall, since their only function is to mate with a new queen. A queen only mates once—she takes the drone’s reproductive bits with her—that’s why the drones die after mating. Isn’t nature wonderful?
True. A female queen develops when the worker bees give the larva of a female, Royal Jelly to develop her into a queen.
I should have gotten on the climate change bandwagon decades ago—it explains much of my youthful behavior. /S
But why do they bother to make all this crap up? Can’t they find something useful to contribute to society?
This is gibberish on a number of levels. It does not describe the behavior of social bees at any time during evolution or since creation. Bees visiting flowers do so to gather nectar and or pollen mostly for feeding to juveniles. Males social bees are not equipped to do that.
The article probably refers to the specialized solitary male bees which may pollinate certain species of orchids because they mistake part of the orchid flower as a female solitary bee of the same bee species. If the time of male bee sexual activity does not coincide with the blooming period of the orchid there may be a problem. However, none of that information seems to appear in the article.
This makes no sense. The bees are early. The flowers are early. Everything is early. So how could they now be “out of synch”? They are all just earlier.
Plus, it appears that things are still being pollinated.
And anyway, I thought the problem was that the bees were dying, not that they were having excessive sex.
Of course, anytime I see East Anglia, I laugh too hard to think about science.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.