The Real “Bee Problem”

 Jesal Gandhi

The Real “Bee Problem”

If you have kept in touch with issues in science and the environment over the years, you may have heard of “the bee problem.” To those unaware, this problem involves declining population numbers of bees, which leads to less pollination and subsequently food chain issues. However, what most people are misinformed about is the fact that wild bees, not honey bees, are the species that are declining rapidly. In fact, the rise of honey bee populations is itself posing threats to not only wild bee populations, but to the environment as well, and these effects are exacerbated by climate change. 

So why exactly is the fall in wild bee populations such a problem? To understand why, we need to view bee species as analogous to keys, while the plants they pollinate are the locks to these keys. Honey bees can be seen as a universal key that can unlock (or pollinate) a wide variety of plants; however, due to this universality, honey bees are very inefficient at pollinating certain plants. Meanwhile, a wild bee species carries a more specific key that can pollinate a smaller range of plants but is much more efficient at doing so. In a video from Planet A, reporter Amanda Coulson-Drasner states, “A hectare of apples, for example, would require tens of thousands of honeybees to pollinate, but only hundreds of this wild bee – because ‘Osmia Cornuta’[a wild bee species] is particularly good at apple pollination.” 

This “lock-and-key principle,” as dubbed by project manager Sabrina Gurten at the Research Insitute of Organic Agriculture, is essential to ensure pollination efficiency. If a large population of honey bees outweighs the number of wild bees in an ecosystem, there will not be enough plants to sustain the wild bees, which take up a much smaller portion of the total amount of bees. This leads to declines in the wild populations of bees, which subsequently decreases pollination diversity and can lead to fewer wild plants, causing problems for the food chain. 

To add to this, climate change is making the effects of this so-called “bee diversity” problem significantly worse. The first piece of evidence comes from a paper from the journal Science. This paper discusses how climate change can directly affect the rates of bee populations, among other negative factors. The research states that “an increasing frequency of unusually hot days is increasing local extinction rates, reducing colonization and site occupancy, and decreasing species richness within a region.” 

Another study done in 2022 examined the symmetry of the wings of bumble bees; wings from 1925 were compared to wings from today, especially during very hot days. It was found that extreme weather conditions stemming from climate changes, contributed to further asymmetry in bumble bees, which is a heavy indicator of stress. 

Yet another piece of evidence of how climate change affects bees negatively regards phenology, which is the timing of events in biological cycles, in relation to the climate. Due to climate change causing snow to melt earlier, flowers also bloom and flourish earlier than they normally would. This has the potential to cause an issue with pollination via bees, as if the phenology of both species doesn’t line up properly, a symbiotic relationship cannot be formed. 

Finally, the sheer importance of bees in general cannot be undermined, either. Bees make up 80% of the entire pollination cycle every year, so even a slight increase in average temperature could make this entire system collapse on itself, causing food chain instability and eventually leading to food shortages. While beekeepers, both amateur and professional, should keep the cultivation of honey bees to a minimum to allow wild bees to flourish, it is even more important that we, as a collective population, put efforts towards reducing climate change. 

Works Cited

Coulson-Drasner, Amanda. “Bee Extinction: Why We're Saving the Wrong Bees.” YouTube, DW Planet A, 30 Apr. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSYgDssQUtA. 

Massey, Nina. “Bees Increasingly Stressed by Climate Change over the Past 100 Years - Study.” Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg, 18 Aug. 2022, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-18/bees-increasingly-stressed-by-climate-change-over-the-past-100-years-study. 

McAfee, Alison. “The Problem with Honey Bees.” Scientific American, Scientific American, 4 Nov. 2020, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-honey-bees/. 

Soroye, Peter, et al. “Climate Change Contributes to Widespread Declines among Bumble Bees across Continents.” Science, vol. 367, no. 6478, 2020, pp. 685–688., https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aax8591. 

“Wild Science: Bees and Climate Change.” YouTube, High Country News, 24 Aug. 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qsoRkl6Njs. 

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