How does climate change impact social bees and bee sociality?

1. Climatic factors are known to mediate the expression of social behaviors. Likewise, variation in social behavior can dictate climate responses. Understanding interactions between climate and sociality is crucial for predicting impacts of climate change on animal populations.

2. These effects are particularly relevant for taxa like bees that exhibit a broad diversity of social states. An emerging body of literature aims to quantify bee responses to environmental change with respect to variation in key functional traits, including sociality. Additionally, decades of research on environmental drivers of social evolution may prove fruitful for predicting shifts in the costs and benefits of social strategies under climate change.

3. In this review, we explore these findings to ask two interconnected questions: (a) how does sociality impact vulnerability to climate change, and (b) how might climate change impact social organization in bees? In doing so, we generate predictions about the impacts of climate change on the expression and distribution of social phenotypes in bees. Furthermore, we emphasize that social and solitary bee populations could be differentially impacted by climate change due to important behavioral, physiological, and life history differences.

4. We highlight important avenues for investigating evolutionary consequences of climate change for social bees and for bee social organization. Understanding linkages between social behavior and environmental conditions is essential for forecasting vulnerability and resilience to climate change across bee taxa.