Bees may rely on different flower resources that are only temporally available. Therefore mapping the amount of the different used flower types may not provide a correct assessment of the contribution of these different plants to bee diet, because large patches may be available only a short time, whereas small patches may be available over the whole flying season. How would you best measure the availability of the different plants for the bee?
Dear Valerie! I’m entomologist, but my professional experience is in medical entomology (vectors of diseases) and epidemiology. This question is for a professional in another field of study. Sorry, but I can’t help you.
Hi Valerie, I agree with you that one must consider flowering phenology when assessing food availability to bees. The way our lab deals with this is we do several censes across the season to measure the floral cover of available food sources for bees to give us an idea of which flowers are available when and at what densities. This is really time consuming however and takes a large team of assistants.
I suppose if you're interested in a specific area, even at a larger scale, if you could get familiarized with the timing of flowering for the available plants, then you could factor that into your model with the mapping of those sources.
Thank you very much. How would you combine both phenology and abundance within a model (maybe a short example)? I have abundance data and I could find information on phenology in the literature. It is not as accurate as field censes, but may still give some indication about potential bias of not accounting for phenology.
This is a great question Valerie. I'm am about to start working on combining my diversity and abundance data with my vegetation data. Haven't yet figured out exactly how I want to do that yet...
A research group in Bristol University has quantified the amount of nectar available from a plant species (not all species have been looked at but many of the common British species have). Using vegetative data collected (e.g. quadrats) you could estimate the amount of nectar available at that one time, and if you have bee abundance/ species data you could correlate the two. You would need to check the species list of plants studied though, as your sites may have completely different species present.
Another good way would be to establish pollen types of workers returning to the hive. In the UK there are pollen colour guides to aid identification... Not sure if this is useful!
Hi Valerie,
I am a professional beekeeper/researcher with a great interest in bee nutrition. If you are asking for a metric that measures the benefit of any specific flora to honey bees, then you must account for a large number of factors. The carbohydrate contribution (nectar) is mainly of benefit as an energy source.
Actual bee nutrition is mainly a function of pollen. And its degree of contribution to colony nutrition is dependent upon the amount of pollen produced, the distance from the hive, its palatability and attractiveness to both foragers and nurse bees, its protein content, its digestibility, its amino acid ratio, sterols, lipids, etc.
So very hard to find a simple metric for quantification. There are, however, some good field measurements of the nutritional contribution to the colony of the combination of pollens being brought in.
The simplest is to look at the amount of jelly placed around newly-emerged larvae--the better the colony nutritional status, the more jelly is placed. One could also measure the amount of brood production, or the colony buildup measured by number of combs covered by adult bees.
I doubt that this is the answer that you were looking for, but hope that it helps!
Randy Oliver
ScientificBeekeeping.com
Dear Valérie, if your French is good there is a study from Belgium related to honey bees, where these factors are weighted in, and even to a certain extent verified with data from observation. It sounds simple, but years of work must have gone into the work, measure nectar amounts produced, flowering period, areal covered of a host of plants and then a robust model. The paper you can find here:
http://www.apidologie.org/index.php?option=com_article&access=standard&Itemid=129&url=/articles/apido/pdf/2006/03/M6017.pdf
In addition I would also recommend to search for work done by Jean-Francois Odoux, related to landscape use and forage for bees. Good luck!
Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
March 1989, Volume 24, Issue 3, pp 181-199
Social foraging in honey bees: how nectar foragers assess their colony's nutritional status
Thank you very much for all your interesting answers!
I indeed have good data on the pollen collected by the bees. I used trap-nests for cavity-nesting bees and collected the pollen deposited as larval food. This does not indicate if the same plants are used for nectar, but give a good overview of the necessary sources for offspring production. However, the data are from the overall flying season and I would like to quantify in some way if the pollen deposited correlates to the availability of the corresponding plant within the bee foraging range. Some plants are highly abundant and the pollen is commonly used, but only occur over a short time period so that I don't know exactly how to account for the "real" availability of the plant.
I will read the articles you suggested me to see if I can find some clues.
Ecology, October, Vol. 84, No. 10 : 2628-2642
LINKING BEES AND FLOWERS: HOW DO FLORAL COMMUNITIES STRUCTURE POLLINATOR COMMUNITIES?
Simon G. Potts, Betsy Vulliamy, Amots Dafni, Gidi Ne'eman, and Pat Willmer
(doi: 10.1890/02-0136)
Hi! Maybe a more specific modelling question: if I have data on pollen use in a whole season (but not for several points in time ), plant phenology and plant abundance. What may be the best method to assess pollen availability? Is there a good way to control / correct for different flowering duration of different plants? The question is not easy to formulate, hope it is somehow understandable.
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