{"id":235753,"date":"2026-04-23T02:38:42","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T07:38:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/when-humidity-changes-so-do-the-colors-of-sweat-bees"},"modified":"2026-04-23T02:38:42","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T07:38:42","slug":"when-humidity-changes-so-do-the-colors-of-sweat-bees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/when-humidity-changes-so-do-the-colors-of-sweat-bees","title":{"rendered":"When humidity changes, so do the colors of sweat bees"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/when-humidity-changes-so-do-the-colors-of-sweat-bees3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Nature is a riot of color. In the animal kingdom, many species, from insects to cephalopods, use their permanent color or change it for communication, camouflage, and thermoregulation. While this type of reversible shift has been extensively studied, less is known about how the environment may passively affect coloration. In a paper <a href=\"https:\/\/royalsocietypublishing.org\/rsbl\/article\/22\/4\/20250803\/481403\/Humidity-induces-structural-colour-change-and\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal <i>Biology Letters<\/i>, scientists report that sweat bees change color as ambient humidity fluctuates.<\/p>\n<p>Sweat bees are small to medium-sized bees that are known for their attraction to human perspiration. The study was prompted by a student researcher, Jorge De La Cruz, who noticed something strange while working at the UC Santa Barbara museum. When he placed the bees in a high-humidity chamber (a common technique to make dried specimens flexible for handling), he noticed they changed color. His colleagues decided to investigate further.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers exposed two dozen preserved female specimens of fine-striped sweat bees (Agapostemon subtilior) to high and low humid conditions while cameras tracked color changes over 55 hours. They also looked at more than 1,000 photos of these bees that regular people had uploaded to the iNaturalist app, matching each bee\u2019s color with the estimated humidity at the time and location the photo was taken.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nature is a riot of color. In the animal kingdom, many species, from insects to cephalopods, use their permanent color or change it for communication, camouflage, and thermoregulation. While this type of reversible shift has been extensively studied, less is known about how the environment may passively affect coloration. In a paper published in the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235753\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}