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Abstract Climatic factors are known to shape the expression of social behaviours. Likewise, variation in social behaviour can dictate climate responses. Understanding interactions between climate and sociality is crucial for forecasting vulnerability and resilience to climate change across animal taxa.These interactions are particularly relevant for taxa like bees that exhibit a broad diversity of social states. An emerging body of literature aims to quantify bee responses to environmental change with respect to variation in key functional traits, including sociality. Additionally, decades of research on environmental drivers of social evolution may prove fruitful for predicting shifts in the costs and benefits of social strategies under climate change.In this review, we explore these findings to ask two interconnected questions: (a) how does sociality mediate vulnerability to climate change, and (b) how might climate change impact social organisation in bees? We highlight traits that intersect with bee sociality that may confer resilience to climate change (e.g. extended activity periods, diet breadth, behavioural thermoregulation) and we generate predictions about the impacts of climate change on the expression and distribution of social phenotypes in bees.The social evolutionary consequences of climate change will be complex and heterogeneous, depending on such factors as local climate and plasticity of social traits. Many contexts will see an increase in the frequency of eusocial nesting as warming temperatures accelerate development and expand the temporal window for rearing a worker brood. More broadly, climate‐mediated shifts in the abiotic and biotic selective environments will alter the costs and benefits of social living in different contexts, with cascading impacts at the population, community and ecosystem levels. 

Abstract Species are often expected to shift their distributions either poleward or upslope to evade warming climates and colonise new suitable climatic niches. However, from 18‐years of fixed transect monitoring data on 88 species of butterfly in the midwestern United States, we show that butterflies are shifting their centroids in all directions, except towards regions that are warming the fastest (southeast).Butterflies shifted their centroids at a mean rate of 4.87 km year⁻¹. The rate of centroid shift was significantly associated with local climate change velocity (temperature by precipitation interaction), but not with mean climate change velocity throughout the species' ranges.Species tended to shift their centroids at a faster rate towards regions that are warming at slower velocities but increasing in precipitation velocity.Surprisingly, species' thermal niche breadth (range of climates butterflies experience throughout their distribution) and wingspan (often used as metric for dispersal capability) were not correlated with the rate at which species shifted their ranges.We observed high phylogenetic signal in the direction species shifted their centroids. However, we found no phylogenetic signal in the rate species shifted their centroids, suggesting less conserved processes determine the rate of range shift than the direction species shift their ranges.This research shows important signatures of multidirectional range shifts (latitudinal and longitudinal) and uniquely shows that local climate change velocities are more important in driving range shifts than the mean climate change velocity throughout a species' entire range.