Satellites, Beekeepers Track Climate Change Response

Esaias and collaborators also aim to better understand the spread of a nasty invasive species: Africanized honeybees, also known as killer bees. These bees are widespread in the southwest United States and more recently arrived in Florida. Their more aggressive nature means municipalities and beekeepers need to change their practices when Africanized bees arrive.

"There's been a tremendous disparity in predictions for how far north Africanized honeybees are going to go," Harrison said, in part because what limits their expansion is not understood.

As a first step, Esaias's collaborators overlaid satellite climate data with the current Africanized bee range and used a model to predict the future range based on where similar conditions exist.

This shows the bees moving into California's Central Valley and parts of Georgia, but missing most of the eastern United States, which many had predicted would become a core part of the range.

"This is the baseline, but it's startling new information for the beekeeper," Esaias said.

The team hopes to improve these predictions by including EOS's satellite data on vegetation type and greening, coupled with information about what bees forage on and when these plants bloom nationwide.

Esaias aims to refine forage information by developing a national network of hive weight data contributed by volunteer beekeepers.

"It's going to be an issue of how many scale hives we're going to accumulate over time and how may areas we get," Esaias said. "Right now we don't have the volunteers."

Esaias believes that the Africanized bees thrive in places where flowering is triggered by rainfall, rather than the onset of spring, which is why the dryer southwest is a suitable place.

Scale hives could help demonstrate this.

"If we have sufficient scale hive records from Arizona and west Texas, I think they will reveal a startlingly different pattern of nectar flows from the mid Atlantic states that will be due to the type of forage available. And the same for the Midwest… We expect the scale hive data to reveal those patterns in detail."

Related Links:

Jessica Marshall's blog: Environmental Case

Honey Bee Net

How Stuff Works: Bees

Planet Green