Climate Change, Bees and AI: Giving a Voice to the Bees!

Abstract

Climate change plays a significant role in the weakening numbers of pollinators. The planet's increasing temperatures and shifting weather regimes and patterns are causing asynchronies between flowering plants and their pollinators. During the summer of 2023, North America experienced multiple days of severely poor air quality, primarily attributed to the extensive forest fires raging across Northern Canada. Although the impact of poor air quality on insects, in particular, is not well documented, it is recognised that they are vulnerable to these conditions, given that many species rely on pheromone detection and sky polarization for orientation, communication, and foraging. Our objective was to evaluate the impact of various air quality components, on the survival of honeybee colonies. We leveraged a substantial dataset comprising 30,000 beehives distributed across 5,000 sites between 2020 and 2023. We employed a hybrid approach, fusing descriptive statistics with machine learning techniques. Additionally, we extracted pertinent air quality and weather data based on the geographical locations of the hives and the corresponding timestamps. Our findings strongly support the hypothesis that air quality significantly influences the survival of honey bees. We demonstrated that the escalating frequency and intensity of forest fires are already having an observable impact on the quality of habitats for honeybees and, by extension, pollinators in general. We highlight the potential benefits of land management strategies that emphasize the expansion of vegetation in regions prone to frequent forest fires or areas affected by these fires.