A new study identified coffee’s dependence on bees as a significant threat in regions where higher temperatures reduce both the number and variety of these industrious insects.
Coffee is not completely reliant on bees to pollinate, but insect pollination makes better fruit and increases yield by 20 to 25%, observed researchers in a peer-reviewed article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Ideally, the farms will be served by at least five of the many thousands of competing species of bees. The study shows that increased temperatures are likely to make the coffee lands uninhabitable for hives. Bee-suitable habitat is shifting away from the places where arabica thrives. By 2050 climate change could also limit coffee production to a much smaller range.
One solution is to improve the habitat for bee colonies by creating zones where the bees can find shade and water. The authors concluded that reduced coffee suitability and bee species diversity could affect more than one-third of the future coffee-suitable areas “but all future coffee-suitable areas will potentially host at least five bee species, indicating continued pollination services.”