Bumblebees are in trouble. Climate change has significantly increased the likelihood of bumblebees being driven to extinction in some areas of North America and Europe (thread)
Research five years ago showed how warming had shrunk the bees’ habitat across the two regions. newscientist.com/article/dn2787…
But climate change isn’t the only threat: bumblebees have been hit hard by industrial farming practices, as we covered in detail in this feature a few years ago newscientist.com/article/mg2152…
The new study looked at weather records from 15,000 sites and found that due to changes in climatic conditions, the probability of a site being occupied by bumblebees fell by an average of 46% in North America and 17% in Europe, relative to the long-term average last century
“This is the clearest signal so far of climate change already having had quite an important effect on the extinction and colonisation of bumblebee species,” says study author @tnewbold31
Read the full story here newscientist.com/article/223239…
