Abstract
AbstractBees are the most important group of flower visitors providing an essential ecosystem service, namely pollination. Due to the worldwide decline of bees, there should be standardized sampling methods in place to ensure consistent and comparable results between studies. We compared the two commonly used sampling methods of yellow pan traps and transect walk to determine (i) which habitat variables affect the species composition, abundance and species richness of sampled bee communities, (ii) which method potentially contains sampling bias towards some individuals or groups of bees and (iii) the efficiency of sampling in various habitats. We conducted fieldwork in different agricultural habitats distributed along landscape heterogeneity and topography gradients. Our results showed that the height of vegetation, the average number of flowers and the amount of woody vegetation had the greatest influence on the sampling efficiency. Our survey also demonstrated that sampling by transect walk captured less bees in general, especially in stubble, maize, and cereal fields. We found thatApis melliferaandBombusspp. were well represented in samples collected by the transect walk method, while the abundance of other genera, especiallyDasypoda, HylaeusandPanurguswas higher in pan traps. Based on the results, we suggest (i) the transect walk method to compare samples of flower-visiting wild bee communities from various habitats of different vegetation and flower characteristics, (ii) application of the transect walk or pan traps to compare similar habitats and (iii) adoption of a comprehensive method which would incorporate both sampling techniques to gain a more complex insight into wild bee species composition.
Highlights
Honey bee (Apis mellifera, L.) and wild bee species (Apoidea) are the most important groups of flower visitors for a wide range of trees, bushes, herbaceous, and crop plant species in different climates all over the world (Michener, 2000; Potts et al, 2016)
Our results show that the average abundance and richness of bee species per site or per crop/land use types collected by the transect walk sampling method was smaller relative to that collected by the pan traps
In case of the transect walk sampling method, it provides only an actual state of the bee community, which could result in fewer bee species and individuals per sample than a longer time lapsed sampling captured by pan traps
Summary
Honey bee (Apis mellifera, L.) and wild bee species (Apoidea) are the most important groups of flower visitors for a wide range of trees, bushes, herbaceous, and crop plant species in different climates all over the world (Michener, 2000; Potts et al, 2016). In some studies concerning the pan trap method, systematic bias was found between the number of captured bees and the amount of flowering plants at the sampling sites as blooming flowers were competing with colored pan traps for flower visitors resulting in an under- or oversampled abundance and number of bee species (Cane, Minckley, & Kervin, 2001; Kovács-Hostyánszki, Batáry, & Báldi, 2011; Mayer, 2005; Roulston, Smith, & Brewster, 2007; Wilson, Griswold, & Messinger, 2008; Popic, Davila, & Wardle, 2013). Our aim was to compare the efficiency of these two methods with different habitats of such local and landscape scale characteristics as vegetation structure and land-use type e.g. different crop fields versus grasslands and
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