1. How does sociality impact vulnerability to climate change?
Sociality shapes bees’ life histories, physiological traits, and
behavioral repertoires. These traits can broadly influence how bees
respond to climatic variables, and therefore their vulnerability to
environmental change (Figure 1). Group living has been proposed to
provide buffering effects against environmental variability (Kennedy et
al., 2018; Komdeur and Ma, 2021), which may explain why cooperatively
breeding animals to thrive in regions characterized by strong climatic
variability (Jetz and Rubenstein, 2011; Lukas and Clutton-Brock, 2017;
Sheehan et al., 2015). While a considerable body of literature explores
effects of climate change on bees that are social, many fewer
investigate social effects at the species level, i.e., by assessing
social behavior as a predictor variable across bee species. Where data
do exist, patterns have been mixed. Some studies have found significant
relationships between sociality and climate-relevant functional traits,
like desiccation resistance and thermal tolerance (da Silva unpub.,
Hamblin et al., 2017). Others have shown that sociality was weakly or
not at all associated with climate change responses, including
phenological shifts (Bartomeus et al., 2011; Meiners et al., 2020) and
responses to extreme weather events (Graham et al., 2021). More
commonly, studies have evaluated sociality as a predictor of responses
to anthropogenic landscape change. Social bees may be less susceptible
than solitary bees to urbanization (Banaszak-Cibicka and Żmihorski,
2012; Harrison et al., 2018) and agricultural intensification (Forrest
et al., 2015; Hall et al., 2019). While these studies are informative
for suggesting general patterns of social resilience to environmental
change, more work investigating climate variables specifically is
necessary to understand social trait-related responses to climate
change. A promising starting-place to generate predictions for these
studies is by examining life history, behavioral, and physiological
trait variation between social and solitary bees.