This year was crazy in Seville with plants flowering 2-3 months earlier than last year. So we went to sample, and guess what: bees were there too. Despite expectations about phenological “mis-match” are raised here and there, we don’t find a big phenological mismatch between plants and pollinators*. I am not talking here of specific species, but taking a community approach. However, this is not the end of the story. Is good that plants and pollinators are in sync, but this alone doesn’t warrants a healthy ecosystem functioning.
Why not? My main worry is that after a mild January and beginning of February, we have now “normal cold days” again. Consequently, we also find little bee activity (today we are sampling at 14ºC just to make sure this is true). Hence, both plants and bees are likely to suffer. The demographic implications of this are hard to predict, maybe is not a big deal if it happens only one year, but if it happens often, I presume can be quite bad. All in all its hard to quantify, but I suspect that we need to go back to population dynamics if we want to understand climate change impacts beyond phenological overlaps.
*Don’t take this blog as word, there are plenty of good papers showing it (here and here), including my own (here and here), and very little showing a clear mismatch, most of those on specialized systems.
Bartomeus lab 