Bees have many different ways of building their homes.

Many people will be familiar with the hives of European honeybees, often found in tree cavities. But many other bees – including many of Australia’s roughly 2,000 species of native bees – build their nests underground, in plant stems or in wood cavities.

Our new paper published in Nature Communications shows that the extent to which native Australian bees can cope with increasing heat depends on the type of nest they use.

Surprisingly, the species that are the most tolerant to heat are also the most vulnerable to future warming.

An important question

Understanding whether tolerance to heat can evolve is an important question for understanding how species might respond to further climate change.

However, most studies show no relationship between how tolerant land-based species are to heat and the average ambient temperatures across their range (often calculated at a coarse 1 x 1 kilometre resolution). This suggests most animals will have a very limited ability to evolve greater tolerance to heat.

But these studies don’t consider species microclimates – that is, the climates species actually experience depending on their behaviour. Our new study aimed to address this........

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