Topics: pollinators, Flowers, Agriculture, bees, Climate Change, Sustainability News, News
The Guardian has the best possible lede for this one, so without further ado:
Sexual deceit, pressed flowers and Victorian bee collectors are combined in new scientific research which demonstrates for the first time that climate change threatens flower pollination, which underpins much of the world’s food production.
Here’s what’s going on: researchers in U.K. followed the relationship between a type of orchid and the specific bee species that pollinates it. Thanks to a nifty trick of evolution, the orchids flower each year at the exact time that the bees emerges to do its thing. But looking back to the 1850s, the team found that rising spring temperatures are messing up both the bees’ and the flowers’ timing — and it’s not doing so equally, meaning that they’re missing one another.
Lindsay Abrams is a staff writer at Salon, reporting on all things sustainable. Follow her on Twitter @readingirl, email labrams@salon.com.
More Lindsay Abrams.
