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Response diversity of wild bees to overwintering temperatures

  • Global change ecology - Original research
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Abstract

Biodiversity can provide insurance against environmental change, but only if species differ in their response to environmental conditions (response diversity). Wild bees provide pollination services to wild and crop plants, and response diversity might insure this function against changing climate. To experimentally test the hypothesis that bee species differ in their response to increasing winter temperature, we stored cocoons of nine bee species at different temperatures during the winter (1.5–9.5 °C). Bee species differed significantly in their responses (weight loss, weight at emergence and emergence date). The developmental stage during the winter explained some of these differences. Bee species overwintering as adults generally showed decreased weight and earlier emergence with increasing temperature, whereas bee species overwintering in pre-imaginal stages showed weaker or even opposite responses. This means that winter warming will likely affect some bee species negatively by increasing energy expenditure, while others are less sensitive presumably due to different physiology. Likewise, species phenologies will respond differently to winter warming, potentially affecting plant–pollinator interactions. Responses are not independent of current flight periods: bees active in spring will likely show the strongest phenological advances. Taken together, wild bee diversity provides response diversity to climate change, which may be the basis for an insurance effect.

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Acknowledgments

We kindly thank all departments of the University of Göttingen who helped by providing climate chambers, and Heinz Coners, Barbara Hohlmann, Evelyn Vorbeck and Hans-Otto Heise for technical assistance. We thank Bernd Gruber, Carsten Dormann, Maximilian von Fragstein and Mike Hermann for providing bees and Susanne Schiele for practical advice, and Ignasi Bartomeus and Jordi Bosch for comments that greatly improved the manuscript. Funding was provided to J.F. by a scholarship of the DBU (German Federal Environmental Foundation), and to T.T. by DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).

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  1. Jochen Fründ

    Present address: Department of Integrative Biology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada

  2. Sarah L. Zieger

    Present address: Animal Ecology, Georg-August-University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

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  1. Agroecology, Department of Crop Sciences, Georg-August-University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

    Jochen Fründ, Sarah L. Zieger & Teja Tscharntke

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Communicated by Jochen Fründ.

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Fründ, J., Zieger, S.L. & Tscharntke, T. Response diversity of wild bees to overwintering temperatures. Oecologia 173, 1639–1648 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-013-2729-1

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