Description
We studied the pollen foraging of bumblebees in high-quality and low-quality landscapes. Individual bumblebees tend to forage on only a small number of flowers during any one foraging trip. This is likely due to costs or constraints related to the information processing required to exploit each flower species and could also have to do with how flowers are aggregated in the landscape. In a rich landscape, where many highly rewarding flower species are abundant, the individual forager should benefit from specializing on a few or just a single flower species. However, different individuals should specialize on different flower species, to achieve resource partitioning. In a poor landscape, the reverse should be true. We thus hypothesized that the diets among individuals should overlap more in poor landscapes, and that the diet breadth of individual bumblebee workers should be wider in poor landscapes. We analysed pollen samples from the corbiculae of ca 500 individuals of seven bumblebee species, using a deep learning automated pollen analysis method. The data generally supported our hypotheses, although there was also an effect of the local patch quality, such that e.g. individuals foraging in flower strips of Phacelia tanacetifolia specialized nearly entirely on that species, even though the flower strips occurred in generally poor landscapes. However, in general we conclude that in high quality landscapes, individuals had narrower diets and less overlap among individuals. This should allow them both to forage more efficiently and avoid competition within and among species.| Period | 2022 Oct 14 |
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| Event title | 35th Annual Meeting of the Scandinavian Association of Pollination Ecology (SCAPE) |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Uppsala, SwedenShow on map |