Does bumble bee (<i>Bombus spp.</i>) diet breadth vary with differences in floral resource abundance?
Abstract
In the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, changes in the availability of floral resources through the growing season may affect the ability of bumble bee colonies to successfully complete their life cycle and produce reproductive individuals in the season’s end. A way bees could potentially deal with this challenge is by broadening their diets —visiting a wider variety of flower species for pollen and nectar. I investigated the diet breadths of three bumble bee species in that region at the species and individual levels, asking whether bee diet breadths varied with floral resource abundance. I found that at both the species and individual level, bees’ diet breadth does not seem to vary with floral resource abundance. Bees may have another strategy for dealing with a lack of floral resources, or their diet breadth may be constrained by other factors such as competition.
Local Knowledge Graph (10 entities)
Related Works
Items connected by shared entities, co-authorship, citations, or semantic similarity.
Resource partitioning in bumblebees: experimental studies of foraging behavior
Local geographic distributions of bumble bees near Crested Butte, Colorado: Competition and community structure revisited
Does Bumble Bee Diet Breadth vary with the Floral Abundance in a Meadow?
Supplementary material from "Nutrient niche dynamics among wild pollinators"
Data from: Experimental species removals impact the architecture of pollination networks
Data from: Fitness costs and benefits of a non-native floral resource for subalpine solitary bees
Some Factors Historically Affecting The Distribution and Abundance of Fishes In The Gunnison River
Colorado?s Alpine Ecosystem Health ? A Case Study on San Juan, Sawatch, and West Elk Mountains
An Ecological Basis for Beaver Management in the Rocky Mountain Region
References (31)
10 in Knowledge Hub, 21 external