New research shows that the world's favorite pesticide is making it harder for bumblebees to keep their hive warm.
Habitat loss and monocultures of agricultural crops have led to food shortages for bumblebees. They store more of the flowers' nectar in their nest than honeybees. They gather food to feed their children.
In order to keep warm in areas where other bees can't, bumblebees use their own body temperature and hive's heat to regulate their own temperature.
In cooler areas, they are important pollinators, and essential for the development of larvae if their brood is kept between 25 and 35C.
The colony cools down when there is not enough food to go around. Resource depletion is only one of the things messing with the bees.
Farmers and gardeners use glyphosate to kill weeds. It was thought to be harmless to bees due to the fact that the chemical only affects plants, fungi, and somebacteria.
The study is the latest in a long line of reports on the harmful effects ofGlyphosate on bee colonies.
The University of Konstanz wanted to know how this chemical affects bumblebees.
Each colony was divided into two parts by a wire mesh with the same number of bees on each side. Workers were given sugar water and pollen. The other side was fed the same as the other side.
Because bumblebees don't exchange liquid food like honeybees, cross-contamination wasn't a problem.
The researchers were not told which side of the colony they were feeding the bees on until all the data was collected.
They wanted to know if individual bees would be affected.
They isolated workers from the other side of the colony and gave them a dummy that the bees would care for as if it were real.
The results of the experiment were weak even though the bees had been fed with sugar water and the individual bees had been exposed to weed killer.
The bees need to be observed as a colony to see the full effects of stress.
The researchers recorded temperature data in two parts of a brood, one with pupae and one without.
After the colonies were divided and half of them put on a diet of sugar water, the scientists limited their food resources and started to measure the changes in brood temperature on both sides of the nest.
The authors said that there was no difference in nest temperature between the two sides of the colony.
The effects ofGlyphosate exposure became evident when colonies experienced limited resources.
When the food supply was reduced, the nest that hadn't been exposed to glyphosate cooled down.
On the other side of the mesh, the same resource limitation and exposure to Glyphosate caused temperatures to dip below the optimal range for bumblebees.
This phenomenon could reduce breeding rates in periods of food scarcity and contribute to a further decline of bumblebees.
The findings of this study are both illuminating and alarming because bumblebees are considered surrogates for how other wild bee species might be affected.
It's not clear why the bumblebees were affected, but the scientists think it's because of the effects of the pesticide on the bees.
The study raises concerns about the "subtle, non lethal" effects of a herbicide that was thought to be harmless.
The research was published in a journal.
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