In your stomach or in your nectar? Disentangling the effects of two pollination-related yeasts on bumblebee behavior and foraging
Abstract
The study of plant-insect interactions and pollination has just begun to scratch the surface of the microbes that inhabit many of the surfaces involved in these interactions. While most microbial studies have focused on the roles of obligate nectar yeasts in mediating pollinator behavior and fitness outcomes in plants, there are entire communities of nectar and pollinator microbes that have been overlooked. Their involvement in these areas is no less important than that of nectar yeasts, but their roles are harder to investigate and quantify. Here, we investigated one such microbe: the bumblebee specialist, Starmerella bombi, which primarily lives in the nests and stomachs of bumblebees but can be dispersed to other bee nests via nectar. By inoculating the species-specific nectar analogue of Corydalis caseana ssp. brandegeei near the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory with S.bombi, we tested whether Bombus appositus foragers preferred S. bombi inoculated flowers over sterile control flowers and M. reukaufii inoculated flowers. Furthermore, we assessed whether these insects spend more time at S. bombi-inoculated flowers over sterile flowers and M. reukaufii inoculated flowers. We found that bumblebee foragers showed no preference for either of the focal yeast species when compared to sterile nectar, suggesting that inoculated nectar had no effect on foraging behavior in terms of number of flowers visited, time spent on individual plants, or time spent on individual flowers. Ultimately, this result will contribute to our understanding of how pollinator behavior could be mediated by insect-inhabiting microbes and the role they play in shaping the evolution of floral rewards and potential outcomes to plant fitness.
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References (37)
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