Abstract
Bees rely on floral pollen and nectar for food. Therefore, pollinator friendly plantings are often used to enrich habitats in bee conservation efforts. As part of these plantings, non‐native plants may provide valuable floral resources, but their effects on native bee communities have not been assessed in direct comparison with native pollinator friendly plantings. In this study, we performed a common garden experiment by seeding mixes of 20 native and 20 non‐native pollinator friendly plant species at separate neighboring plots at three sites in Maryland, USA, and recorded flower visitors for 2 years. A total of 3,744 bees (120 species) were collected. Bee abundance and species richness were either similar across plant types (midseason and for abundance also late season) or lower at native than at non‐native plots (early season and for richness also late season). The overall bee community composition differed significantly between native and non‐native plots, with 11 and 23 bee species being found exclusively at one plot type or the other, respectively. Additionally, some species were more abundant at native plant plots, while others were more abundant at non‐natives. Native plants hosted more specialized plant–bee visitation networks than non‐native plants. Three species out of the five most abundant bee species were more specialized when foraging on native plants than on non‐native plants. Overall, visitation networks were more specialized in the early season than in late seasons. Our findings suggest that non‐native plants can benefit native pollinators, but may alter foraging patterns, bee community assemblage, and bee–plant network structures.
Highlights
In this 2-year study, we experimentally tested how flowering plants grown from seed mixes composed of either native or non-native seeds affected the abundance, species richness, and community structure of bees
Our study showed that a seed mix of non-native pollinator friendly plants was well accepted and frequented by a diverse bee community
In the early and late season, many bees chose non-native over native plants, while no differences were found in the middle of summer
Summary
In this 2-year study, we experimentally tested how flowering plants grown from seed mixes composed of either native or non-native seeds affected the abundance, species richness, and community structure of bees. We analyzed differences in bee species richness per sampling event, abundance per sampling event, network specificity (H2′) per season, and species specificity (d′) per season between native and non-native plots using linear mixed-effect models (LMM; “lmer” function, “lme4” package (Bates et al, 2015)).
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