Despite being essential to sustaining agriculture and the health of ecosystems, bee populations are rapidly collapsing because of human activity. First, a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids was definitively linked to this dangerous decline. Now, as revealed in a recent study in the journal Ecology Letters, climate change is another human-caused environmental factor hurting bees.
To learn this, the authors analyzed a long-term dataset of North American bumblebee species as their populations rose and fell in correlation with the community temperature index (CTI), a measure of the balance of warm-and cool-adapted species in a community.
