Abstract
Bumble bee communities are strongly disrupted worldwide through the population decline of many species; a phenomenon that has been generally attributed to landscape modification, pesticide use, pathogens, and climate change. The mechanisms by which these causes act on bumble bee colonies are, however, likely to be complex and to involve many levels of organization spanning from the community down to the least understood individual level. Here, we assessed how the morphology, weight and foraging behavior of individual workers are affected by their surrounding landscape. We hypothesized that colonies established in landscapes showing high cover of intensive crops and low cover of flowering crops, as well as low amounts of local floral resources, would produce smaller workers, which would perform fewer foraging trips and collect pollen loads less constant in species composition. We tested these predictions with 80 colonies of commercially reared Bombus impatiens Cresson placed in 20 landscapes spanning a gradient of agricultural intensification in southern Québec, Canada. We estimated weekly rate at which workers entered and exited colonies and captured eight workers per colony over a period of 14 weeks during the spring and summer of 2016. Captured workers had their wing, thorax, head, tibia, and dry weight measured, as well as their pollen load extracted and identified to the lowest possible taxonomic level. We did not detect any effect of landscape habitat composition on worker morphology or body weight, but found that foraging activity decreased with intensive crops. Moreover, higher diversity of local floral resources led to lower pollen constancy in intensively cultivated landscapes. Finally, we found a negative correlation between the size of workers and the diversity of their pollen load. Our results provide additional evidence that conservation actions regarding pollinators in arable landscapes should be made at the landscape rather than at the farm level.
Highlights
Bumble bees are economically important pollinators worldwide
The limits of the southern range of most of the 67 species investigated by Kerr et al [11] have shrunk across continents within the last 110 years. These falloffs do not appear to be random given that some species are more at risk than others [12,13]. Scientists attribute these declines to a combination of factors, including climate change [11], intensive use of pesticides [14,15,16,17,18], diseases, parasites and predation [19,20,21], as well as landscape simplification [22,23] and the subsequent decrease in local floral resource availability [21,24,25]
We found evidence that the effect of intensive crops was modulated by local floral resources (Table 2; Fig 3)
Summary
Bumble bees are economically important pollinators worldwide Their morphology and behavior make them sturdy pollinators, able to forage in colder and wetter conditions than most pollinating insects [1]. The limits of the southern range of most of the 67 species investigated by Kerr et al [11] have shrunk across continents within the last 110 years. These falloffs do not appear to be random given that some species are more at risk than others [12,13]. Scientists attribute these declines to a combination of factors, including climate change [11], intensive use of pesticides [14,15,16,17,18], diseases, parasites and predation [19,20,21], as well as landscape simplification [22,23] and the subsequent decrease in local floral resource availability [21,24,25]
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