ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Flying, nectar-loaded honey bees conserve water and improve heat tolerance by reducing wingbeat frequency and metabolic heat production.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 17 citations in OpenAlex.
- Social behavior and climate change: how rising temperatures shape insect societies.Current opinion in insect science · 2026Review
- Realistic 3D morphology reshapes insect heat budgets.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Increasing temperatures affect thoracic muscle performance in Arctic bumblebees.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Lack of thermal acclimation in multiple indices of climate vulnerability in bumblebees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Bees remain heat tolerant after acute exposure to desiccation and starvation.The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- Insect Flight: State of the Field and Future Directions.Integrative and comparative biology · 2024Article
- A thermal performance curve perspective explains decades of disagreements over how air temperature affects the flight metabolism of honey bees.The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- Flying, nectar-loaded honey bees conserve water and improve heat tolerance by reducing wingbeat frequency and metabolic heat production.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Heat waves are becoming increasingly common due to climate change, making it crucial to identify and understand the capacities for insect pollinators, such as honey bees, to avoid overheating. We examined the effects of hot, dry air temperatures on the physiological and behavioral mechanisms that honey bees use to fly when carrying nectar loads, to assess how foraging is limited by overheating or desiccation. We found that flight muscle temperatures increased linearly with load mass at air temperatures of 20 or 30 °C, but, remarkably, there was no change with increasing nectar loads at an air temperature of 40 °C. Flying, nectar-loaded bees were able to avoid overheating at 40 °C by reducing their flight metabolic rates and increasing evaporative cooling. At high body temperatures, bees apparently increase flight efficiency by lowering their wingbeat frequency and increasing stroke amplitude to compensate, reducing the need for evaporative cooling. However, even with reductions in metabolic heat production, desiccation likely limits foraging at temperatures well below bees' critical thermal maxima in hot, dry conditions.
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