Conclusions
Sociality has repeatedly arisen as an adaptive response to extreme and
variable environments. The same features of sociality that have enabled
its evolutionary success in these conditions may render social organisms
particularly resilient to climate change (Blumstein et al., 2022; Fisher
et al., 2021; Komdeur and Ma, 2021; Menzel and Feldmeyer, 2021). In many
contexts, changing climate will favor social bees with long activity
periods, generalist diets, and behavioral adaptations (e.g.,
communication and thermoregulatory strategies) that facilitate survival
in stochastic environments. In other cases, extreme climate conditions
may select for life history patterns and expanded physiological
tolerances common to solitary bees. Our understanding of these effects
is currently data-limited and should be expanded in part through open
sharing of bee functional trait data (especially physiological tolerance
and social behavioral data), which will enable meta-analyses of the
traits co-occurring with sociality and their impacts on climate change
responses. Beyond these differential impacts, climate change can also
shape social evolution itself by shifting the abiotic and biotic
selective pressures that determine the fitness outcomes of different
social strategies. The direction of these shifts will be largely
heterogeneous within and across taxa, depending on such factors as local
climatic variability and the extent to which plasticity governs
responses to environmental change. Experimental studies of socially
polymorphic bee species (e.g., common garden experiments, reciprocal
transplants, and studies manipulating environmental conditions) will
extend our understanding of these evolutionary consequences. Future work
in this area has the potential to clarify interactions between climate
change and sociality at multiple levels and timescales, from shifting
distributions of social bees to evolutionary transitions in social
organization.