Climate change is putting bees at risk: 37 per cent of species in Europe are in decline

Rising temperatures, drought and increasingly erratic seasons are, in fact, altering the availability of floral resources. Plants may bring forward or delay their flowering, whilst the life cycle of pollinators may follow a different timetable. The result is a mismatch that compounds the other pressures already exerted on bees by pesticides, pathogens and habitat change.

This is by no means a trivial matter. There are over 20,000 species of bees worldwide, and in Italia there are more than a thousand wild species. In Europe, 37 per cent of species have declining populations and around one in ten species – including bees and butterflies – is threatened with extinction. And this is where the environmental problem also becomes an agricultural one: around 75 per cent of the world’s major food crops depend, at least in part, on pollination.

This will be the focus of around 500 scientific papers presented at EurBee 11, the European Apidology Conference, which is being held in Bologna for the first time from 7 to 10 September. Researchers from nearly 50 countries will be attending to discuss not only climate change, but also genetics, nutrition, the microbiome, agroecology and new technologies.

“Climate change is placing new pressures on a system already subject to multiple stressors,” explains Antonio Nanetti, senior researcher at CREA and president of EurBee 11. This is why it is not enough to isolate a single cause: “To understand how to protect bees, we must study climate, resource availability, pathogens, pesticides and habitat change together, and understand how these factors interact.”

There is also a misunderstanding that needs to be avoided. When we talk about bees, we immediately think of the honeybee, beehives and honey. But the issue is much broader than that. ‘The honeybee is only part of this story. Wild bees are a fundamental component of biodiversity and have different needs and vulnerabilities,’ emphasises Nanetti.The choice of Italia as the venue for the first Italian edition of EurBee thus also recognises the quality and tradition of Italian apidological research, which will be at the centre of discussions with the international scientific community for four days.