Abstract
Bumble bees are important crop pollinators and provide important pollination services to their respective ecosystems. Their pollen diet and thus food preferences can be characterized through nucleic acid sequence analysis. We present ITS2 amplicon sequence data from pollen collected by bumble bees. The pollen was collected from six different bumble bee colonies that were placed in independent agricultural landscapes. We compared next-generation (Illumina), i.e., short-read, and third-generation (Nanopore), i.e., MinION, sequencing techniques. MinION data were preprocessed using traditional and Nanopore specific tools for comparative analysis and were evaluated in comparison to short-read sequence data with conventional processing. Based on the results, the dietary diary of bumble bee in the studied landscapes can be identified. It is known that short reads generated by next-generation sequencers have the advantage of higher quality scores while Nanopore yields longer read lengths. We show that assignments to taxonomic units yield comparable results when querying against an ITS2-specific sequence database. Thus, lower sequence quality is compensated by longer read lengths. However, the Nanopore technology is improving in terms of data quality, much cheaper, and suitable for portable applications. With respect to the studied agricultural landscapes we found that bumble bees require higher plant diversity than only crops to fulfill their foraging requirements.
Highlights
Crop pollinators such as wild and domestic bees are important ecosystem service providers and in high demand (Aizen et al, 2008)
We aim to identify the pollen diet of a common bumble bee species (Bombus terrestris L.) in agricultural landscapes
From a technical perspective this work aims at developing field protocols for a rapid MinION-based assessment of pollen plant diversity in the field and utilization by pollinators, including estimation of crop pollination services delivered (Pomerantz et al, 2018; Krehenwinkel et al, 2019)
Summary
Crop pollinators such as wild and domestic bees are important ecosystem service providers and in high demand (Aizen et al, 2008). We aim to identify the pollen diet of a common bumble bee species (Bombus terrestris L.) in agricultural landscapes In this respect, the identification of pollen resources can reveal part of their food plant preferences and dietary requirements and can guide future conservation measures and EU agri-environmental schemes. Identification and quantification is generally possible by labor-intensive pollen microscopy (Marzinzig et al, 2018) or nucleic acid sequence analysis (Danner et al, 2016). Approaches to the latter include DNA barcoding (Taberlet et al, 2012; Sickel et al, 2015; Bell et al, 2016) and genome skimming (Dodsworth, 2015). The internal transcribed spacer (ITS) sequence is a popular genetic species barcode in plants (Chen et al, 2010; Yao et al, 2010; Bell et al, 2016)
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