How understory bee communities compare to open meadows in the Rocky Mountains

Abstract

Forest associated species, bees and otherwise, are among the world's most vulnerable species due human activity such as deforestation. Even though bees are significant to ecosystem health by providing such important services as pollination, basic information on bee biodiversity and factors driving their distributions in temperate coniferous forest ecosystems are relatively scarce. It is likely that there are a minority of bee species that are associated with forest habitats; however, very few have been described. In Colorado, 34% of the landscape is forested. Montane regions such as the Gunnison Valley are predicted to experience the most extreme changes in climate, potentially making bee communities vulnerable. The goals of this research were to determine at which site (meadow or forest) and at what time of day were social and solitary bees most abundant around Gothic, Colorado. We used catch rate as a proxy for abundance. We found that social bees (Bombus spp.) have the same abundance in the meadow as the forest at any time of the day. Solitary bees, on the other hand, are more abundant in the meadow regardless of the time of day. This research project provides a baseline for further investigation of forest associated bees.

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