Climate change ‘making male bees more interested in sex than pollinating flowers’

Metro UK ^ | November 7, 2014 | by Harry Readhead

[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.’

[CharlesWayneCT]

I found another article that seems to be more accurate on the specific study:

“The work used museum records stretching back to 1848 to show that the early spider orchid and the miner bee on which it depends for reproduction have become increasingly out of sync as spring temperatures rise due to global warming.

The orchid resembles a female miner bee and exudes the same sex pheromone to seduce the male bee into “pseudocopulation” with the flower, an act which also achieves pollination. The orchids have evolved to flower at the same time as the bee emerges.”

[Western Phil]

Aha! Some of the missing details. Was a little curious about the orchid’s pollinia interaction with the bee, so I looked it up ( http://books.google.com/books?id=FCXd7VEsdPcC&pg=PA860&lpg=PA860&dq=early+spider+orchid+pollinia&source=bl&ots=BaVhDqKT3O&sig=w3KPsAFm74-sQP-vVakduAslR4w&hl=en&sa=X&ei=nOZeVK7hOJX_yQSwwIGoAw&ved=0CEIQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=early%20spider%20orchid%20pollinia&f=false )

Another example of pertinent facts left out by mass media agenda based “science”.

Turns out the the orchid’s pollinia is rather innocuous in that the pollen grains pretty much stick together and the group sort of sticks to the pollinator. Milkweed pollinia are a little more vicious in being in the form of a set of saddle bags which can become irretrievably attached to the pollinator’s leg or tongue and which the pollinator must pull out of the flower with considerable effort. In the ideal world, the pollinator delivers one or both of the saddle bags of pollen to another flower and leaves it there. Often enough though, the pollinator (bee, fly, misc. other insect) collects a number of these things and becomes entrapped. My thought was that if possibly the the orchid was endowed similarly, the population of males that attempted to mate with the flowers would become disabled and be unable to propagate, thus the early emerging males would be the only ones providing the next generation. This is probably not the case here.