US stock market daily report (July 10, 2015, Friday)

A study that appeared in the journal 'Science' indicates that climate change has been affecting - bumblebees. The ecosystem as well as humans will face serious consequences if the bee population continues to decline. We could see a decline in reproduction of plants and food crops that rely on bumblebees as their pollinators.

Dozens of species studied show that many North American and European bumblebees are failing to “track” warming by colonizing new habitats north of their historic range. The results - those bees are disappearing from the southern portions of their normal habitat range.

Researchers believe the retreat of bees along with a move to higher elevations, may reflect the fact that they evolved in cooler climates than many other insect species. The results imply that bees are especially sensitive to warming temperatures.

The study's lead author, ecologist Jeremy Kerr of the University of Ottawa in Canada said, “Climate change is crushing bumblebee species in a vice.”

Researchers amassed data consisting of nearly 423,000 observations of 67 bumblebee species in North America and Europe, dating back to 1901, to see how global climate change is affecting bumblebees. Large-scale changes in territories of the species of bees as well as their “thermal ranges” were mapped - from the warmest and coolest places bees colonize. Statistical models were built to test whether any range in colonization shifts, were associated with climate change.

Findings in the study showed that some bees retreated as many as 300 kilometers from the southern edge of their historic ranges since 1974. Certain areas of the southeastern section of the United States has see the disappearance of the rusty patched bumblebee - Bombus affinis.

Alana Pindar, post-doctoral fellow at the University of Guelph in Canada, ecologist and co-author to the study said, “...even before the neonicotinoid pesticides came into play in the 1980s,” bumblebee ranges had begun to shrink. Pindar added that the retreat of bees from southern territories is “a huge loss for bumblebee distributions” and the activity occurred shockingly fast.

Contributed by Millennium Traders