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      Beekeeping in Europe facing climate change: A mixed methods study on perceived impacts and the need to adapt according to stakeholders and beekeepers

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          Abstract

          The beekeeping sector is suffering from the detrimental effects of climate change, both directly and indirectly. Despite numerous studies conducted on this subject, large-scale research incorporating stakeholders' and beekeepers' perspectives has remained elusive. This study aims to bridge this gap by assessing the extent to which stakeholders involved in the European beekeeping sector and European beekeepers perceive and experience the impacts of climate change on their operations, and whether they had to adapt their practices accordingly. To this end, a mixed-methods study including in-depth stakeholder interviews ( n = 41) and a pan-European beekeeper survey ( n = 844) was completed within the frame of the EU-funded H2020-project B-GOOD. The development of the beekeeper survey was informed by insights from literature and the stakeholder interviews. The results highlighted significant regional disparities in the perceived impacts of climate change, with beekeepers in Southern European regions expressing more negative outlooks, while Northern European beekeepers reported more favourable experiences. Furthermore, survey analysis revealed beekeepers who were classified as ‘heavily impacted’ by climate change. These beekeepers reported lower average honey yields, higher colony winter loss rates and a stronger perceived contribution of honey bees to pollination and biodiversity, underscoring climate change's detrimental impacts on the beekeeping sector. Multinomial logistic regression revealed determinants of the likelihood of beekeepers being classified as ‘heavily impacted’ by climate change. This analysis indicates that Southern European beekeepers experienced a 10-fold likelihood of being classified as heavily impacted by climate change compared to Northern European beekeepers. Other significant factors distinguishing ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ were self-reported level of professionalism as a beekeeper (ranging from pure hobbyist to fully professional, Odds Ratio (OR) = 1.31), number of years active in beekeeping (OR = 1.02), availability of floral resources throughout the bee season (OR = 0.78), beehives located in a forested environment (OR = 1.34), and the presence of local policy measures addressing climate change-related challenges (OR = 0.76).

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          Highlights

          • Climate change (CC) is clearly perceived to be impacting beekeeping in Europe.

          • CC impacts are likely to create winners and losers within the beekeeping sector.

          • Major CC impacts concern local weather conditions and food resource availability.

          • CC impacts are associated with lower honey yield and higher colony winter loss.

          • Southern, professional and ‘forest’ beekeeping boost chance of being impacted by CC.

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          Most cited references42

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          Safeguarding pollinators and their values to human well-being

          Wild and managed pollinators provide a wide range of benefits to society in terms of contributions to food security, farmer and beekeeper livelihoods, social and cultural values, as well as the maintenance of wider biodiversity and ecosystem stability. Pollinators face numerous threats, including changes in land-use and management intensity, climate change, pesticides and genetically modified crops, pollinator management and pathogens, and invasive alien species. There are well-documented declines in some wild and managed pollinators in several regions of the world. However, many effective policy and management responses can be implemented to safeguard pollinators and sustain pollination services.
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            Global warming and the disruption of plant-pollinator interactions.

            Anthropogenic climate change is widely expected to drive species extinct by hampering individual survival and reproduction, by reducing the amount and accessibility of suitable habitat, or by eliminating other organisms that are essential to the species in question. Less well appreciated is the likelihood that climate change will directly disrupt or eliminate mutually beneficial (mutualistic) ecological interactions between species even before extinctions occur. We explored the potential disruption of a ubiquitous mutualistic interaction of terrestrial habitats, that between plants and their animal pollinators, via climate change. We used a highly resolved empirical network of interactions between 1420 pollinator and 429 plant species to simulate consequences of the phenological shifts that can be expected with a doubling of atmospheric CO(2). Depending on model assumptions, phenological shifts reduced the floral resources available to 17-50% of all pollinator species, causing as much as half of the ancestral activity period of the animals to fall at times when no food plants were available. Reduced overlap between plants and pollinators also decreased diet breadth of the pollinators. The predicted result of these disruptions is the extinction of pollinators, plants and their crucial interactions.
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              Widespread losses of pollinating insects in Britain

              Pollination is a critical ecosystem service underpinning the productivity of agricultural systems across the world. Wild insect populations provide a substantial contribution to the productivity of many crops and seed set of wild flowers. However, large-scale evidence on species-specific trends among wild pollinators are lacking. Here we show substantial inter-specific variation in pollinator trends, based on occupancy models for 353 wild bee and hoverfly species in Great Britain between 1980 and 2013. Furthermore, we estimate a net loss of over 2.7 million occupied 1 km2 grid cells across all species. Declines in pollinator evenness suggest that losses were concentrated in rare species. In addition, losses linked to specific habitats were identified, with a 55% decline among species associated with uplands. This contrasts with dominant crop pollinators, which increased by 12%, potentially in response agri-environment measures. The general declines highlight a fundamental deterioration in both wider biodiversity and non-crop pollination services.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Sci Total Environ
                Sci Total Environ
                The Science of the Total Environment
                Elsevier
                0048-9697
                1879-1026
                25 August 2023
                25 August 2023
                : 888
                : 164255
                Affiliations
                [a ]Ghent University, Department of Agricultural Economics, Coupure links 653, B-9000 Gent, Belgium
                [b ]Aarhus University, Department of Ecoscience (ECOS), C.F. Møllers Allé 4-8, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
                [c ]University of Coimbra, Centre for Functional Ecology, Science for People and the Planet, TERRA Associate Laboratory, Calçada Martins de Freitas, 3000-456 Coimbra, Portugal
                [d ]Universidade Aberta, Lisbon, Portugal
                [e ]Ghent University, Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Krijgslaan 281 S2, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium
                Author notes
                [* ]Corresponding author. marie.vanespen@ 123456ugent.be
                Article
                S0048-9697(23)02876-0 164255
                10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.164255
                10280316
                37196971
                81c100cc-9893-4cde-8f9e-184955697063
                © 2023 The Authors

                This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

                History
                : 21 February 2023
                : 12 May 2023
                : 14 May 2023
                Categories
                Article

                General environmental science
                apiculture,climate adaptation,apis mellifera,perception,pollinators decline

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