Climate change could be throwing bees out of sync with plants − meaning males are too distracted by females to carry out pollination.

Certain flowers have evolved so that their flowers appear just as bees begin to emerge after winter.

Warmer springs have resulted in both bees and flowers emerging earlier but they no longer coincide with one another.

By the time flowers bloom, the bees are busy mating so they do not help fertilise the plants in the normal way.

Researchers say that the progressive disruption of pollination systems could lead to the breakdown of co-evolved inter­actions between species.

Lead researcher Anthony Davy, from the university’s school of biological sciences, said that under normal conditions, male bees are deceived into inadvertently pollinating orchid flowers but this process could be disrupted by climate change. He said: “Warming by as little as 2˚C causes the males to emerge much earlier, meaning they are less well synchronised with the orchids.

“The problem is compounded by the female bees which are also emerging earlier, and attracting the attention of the male bees.

“This means that the male bees are more likely to copulate with the female bees, rather than pollinating the orchids.”

Davy said the progressive disruption of pollination systems could lead to the breakdown of co-evolved inter­actions between species because they either respond to different seasonal cues or to the same cues at different rates.

Researchers studied long-term trends in historical records dating back to 1848.

The study shows that male bees fly around nine days earlier for each degree increase in average early spring temperature. Female bees emerge slightly later than males, near peak orchid pollination time.

Researcher Karen Robbirt said: “These orchids have evolved sothat when spring comes, their flowers appear at the same time as this specific bee − making pollination possible.

“But we have shown that plants and their pollinators show different responses to climate change, and that warming will widen the timeline between bees and flowers emerging.”

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