Researchers warn: The bumblebees are heading for extinction

The number of hops has dropped drastically over the past 50 years due to an accelerating "climate chaos". This is what researchers write in a new meta-study published in the scientific journal Science.

The research team, led by the Canadian University of Ottawa, has developed a model with the help of temperature data and half a million observation reports on 66 different species of hops from the past 115 years. With this, various scenarios have been simulated to find out how changes in temperature affect the number of hops.

- We could see how the populations have largely disappeared from the areas that have become warmer. If the decline continues at the same rate, several species may be gone forever within a few decades, Peter Soraye, one of the researchers, tells The Guardian.

The study found that the likelihood of seeing a bumblebee during a walk has decreased by 30 percent in Europe and North America since 1970. And the decline is progressing faster - in some places they are no longer there.

Bumblebees play an important role as pollinators, both in the wild and in agriculture. Without them, the availability of fruits, berries and vegetables would decrease for humans as well as other species.

Previously, the reduction in the number of hops was mainly explained by one-sided cultivation and use of pesticides in large-scale agriculture. Therefore, the researchers were surprised at how much negative effect the temperature increase appears to have had on the hop populations in recent years.

Lina Herbertsson researches pollinating insects at Lund University. She believes that changes in agriculture and forestry have so far had the greatest impact on the decline of hops, but that climate change has now taken over.

Not least in recent years examples of extreme weather and sudden seasonal changes, which are believed to become even more common in the future:

- Spring 2018 was spring late and in Skåne the snow remained on the ground until Easter. A few weeks later it was already high summer and the beginning of extreme drought. The bumblebee communities I was supposed to invent were not at all able to build houses and breed their workers and when the red clover bloomed at the end of May I did not find a single bumblebee.

However, a hopeful hope for the hops provides researchers: By preserving environments that offer natural coolness and protection, such as shrubs, tree collections and grasslands, humans can help the hops survive even in a warmer world.

Although there are measures that can almost be compared to artificial respiration.