To make these measurements, Parkinson placed dozens of bees on top of a ball kept afloat by upward-directed air one at a time. And even when they seemed to want to orient toward an image, they couldn’t seem to walk in a straight line. What she and her team found was startling: Bees that fed on insecticide-dosed sugar water ambled around when presented with moving images they would otherwise lock onto. In this study, however, Parkinson focused on the neurological and behavioral effects on honeybees of low doses of insecticides typically considered safe and acceptable for widespread use. “It’s a bit disheartening” that these harmful chemicals are still sprayed to kill these insects, she said. Rachel Parkinson, the lead author of the study and a neuroethologist at Oxford University, told The Daily Beast that a great deal of research has made clear the detrimental effects of pesticides and insecticides on key pollinator species like honeybees. “Variation in climate can clearly cause higher stress,” Gill said, and human-caused climate change is creating a perfect storm of warm and wet temperatures for the bees.Īnother study published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Insect Science tackled another facet of humanity’s disastrous impact on nature: insecticides. This means that organisms may not display signs of stress until generations later. “Tiny changes in something like the wing shape of a plane, for example, could have quite obviously devastating effects,” Gill said, though it’s still unknown how wing asymmetry affects bee flight.Ĭurrent methods of measuring climate change’s impact on species often rely on lagging metrics, Imperial College London life sciences researcher and study co-author Aoife Cantwell-Jones told The Daily Beast. He found that over the last century, warm and wet years led to bumblebees developing less symmetrical wings-an indicator of stress that is akin to the bee wearing scars due to its environment. Gill led a study published Wednesday in the Journal of Animal Ecology, where he and his team measured the wings of four different bumblebee species preserved in museum collections across Britain. “The work that we’re doing is revealing that a lot of our actions are putting these insects under pressure,” Richard Gill, an insect evolution researcher at Imperial College London, told The Daily Beast.
Taken together, the research suggests that humans pose an existential threat to these pollinator species-one that cannot be fully countered by a simple fix. Two recent studies explore this problem like never before, confirming the role of human activity in wreaking havoc on bee populations. Punch-drunk honeybees unable to walk in a straight line after they’d ingested “safe” concentrations of insecticides bumblebee wings showing signs of stress due to climate change: Humans are messing up bees beyond repair, in ways that could threaten their existence as well as the survival and health of the plants they pollinate. Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
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