IN spring, buff-tailed bumblebee queens (Bombus terrestris) emerge from their winter nests looking for ideal locations to start colonies.

Each colony is founded with an initial batch of eggs that were fertilised the previous year. Two weeks later these eggs become the first batch of worker bees, who will forage for food and tend to the eggs that the queen continues to lay.

The initial stages of the colony, when the number of worker bees is low, can be a very precarious time. The success of the colony depends on how well the queen has chosen their location.

Colonies that are within one kilometre of springtime flowers (to provide nectar and pollen for larvae) show a much higher probability of survival.

The reliance on the presence of spring flowers means that the timing of queens emerging and each founding a colony is crucial.

If the queens emerge before the spring flowers bloom then there will likely not be enough resources for their colonies to survive.

The queens therefore choose when to emerge based on soil and air temperature.

Unfortunately this means they could be vulnerable to the effects of man-made climate change, which is affecting the behaviours of many insects.

This could be disastrous for both the bees that feed on the nectar and the plants that rely on the bees for pollination.

The huge diversity in plant species, animal species, and climate across the globe will mean that the precise effects of climate change can only be understood by considering the complex interactions between each part.

For example, observations made in the Rocky Mountains show that the plant species there seem to have a lower temperature threshold for spring emergence than the bee species.

Therefore, these particular plants will continue to emerge before the bees even if the springtime temperatures rise.

Elsewhere the effects may be different. An interesting question therefore is how bee emergence and flowering manage to maintain synchrony in a changeable climate.

There is evidence that bees are showing some resilience to climate change. In 2007 the first rigorous observations were made of bees continuing to forage late into winter, way beyond when the colonies should have died out.

It emerged that the bees were feeding on winter-flowering plants that were being grown in parks and cities. This suggests that some bee colonies have developed an annual cycle persisting through the winter rather than the summer.

More recently, researchers have found that bees themselves are able to induce flowering in certain plants when pollen is scarce.

Worker bees were observed to cut small holes in the leaves of flowerless plants with their mandibles, but the bees did not do anything with the leaf material that they cut out, which led scientists to investigate why they might be doing it.

By studying the behaviour of bees and plants in controlled experiments, researchers found that bees that were deprived of pollen actively damaged the leaves of flowerless plants, unlike pollen-fed bees.

These damaged plants began flowering on average thirty days earlier than undamaged plants.

Stress is known to induce flowering in plants, and can be artificially induced by applying high or low light intensities and temperatures, crowding, and low oxygen, water or nutrition to plants.

The researchers tried to replicate the damage that the bees caused on flowerless plants using a pair of forceps and a razor, inducing flowering an average of five days earlier than undamaged controls, but 25 days slower than the bee-induced flowering.

The work done by the bees seems therefore to be more specialised than merely physical breakage, perhaps indicating a chemical signal which is yet to be found.

The active inducement of flowering by the bees has a clear benefit to both parties, which may suggest mutual adaptation: both bees and flowers may have evolved to contribute to the mechanism.

Adaptation to new rhythms and environments is what the living world does, and this co-ordination of bees and flowers is an impressive example of their resilience.

We don’t know yet how far and how fast climate change will decouple queen emergence and flowering, and how far hidden mechanisms like this will help both survive.

We do know that climate change is just one of many human-caused dangers to bees, along with removal of spring flowers, colony locations and the widespread use of pesticides.

Ironically, the drastic effects of climate change and human destruction provide examples which show us the remarkable resilience of ecosystems — but sadly there are many more examples where even this resilience is not enough to cope.