Special issue: Bee Aware—behavioral plasticity, dysregulation, and cross-species integration in a changing world Social bee communication in a changing world

Abstract

Communication allows social bees to transform individual experiences into colony-level action, but anthropogenic global change is altering the sensory, physiological, and ecological conditions under which these systems evolved. I argue that climate warming, artificial light at night, anthropogenic vibration, odor pollution, pesticides, pathogens, nutritional simplification, and invasive predators should be understood not merely as parallel stressors, but as forces that reshape the production, transmission, and value of socially shared information. Three themes organize this review. First, global change can directly disrupt communication or alter the payoffs of using socially shared information. Second, communication itself can be plastic, and that plasticity may buffer some forms of change. Third, comparison among honey bees, stingless bees, and bumble bees reveals that not all social information systems will be equally vulnerable to the same stressor. Recent work on the waggle dance is especially revealing: recruits infer source location rather than merely replaying a vector, successful recruitment depends on both landscape structure and individual calibration, and the value of dance information varies among environments. These advances make it possible to move beyond asking whether global change harms bees, to asking how it reorganizes colony information flow. I suggest that this shift in focus clarifies existing challenges, reveals new links among neurobiology, behavior, ecology, and evolution, and highlights the need to protect not only pollinators, but also the communication systems that shape the lives of social bees.