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Abstract
Declines in honey bee health and increasing demand for pollination services highlight a need to optimize crop pollination by wild bees. Apple is an economically important crop in eastern North America, requires insect pollination, and is visited by a diverse bee fauna, but a direct assessment of wild bee pollination in apple orchards is lacking. We combined measurements of two facets of pollination service, per-visit efficiency (fruit and seed set) and relative abundance, to estimate orchard-level, pollinator importance of mining bees (Andrena subgenus Melandrena), bumble bees (Bombus), and honey bees (Apis mellifera L.). Average pollinator importance provided a relative measure that allowed comparison of pollination service among the three focal bees across the study region. On average, a wild bee visit resulted in higher pollen transfer to stigmas, but had the same probability of setting fruit and seed as a honey bee visit. Regionally, pollinator importance of Melandrena and Bombus were 32 and 14 % that of honey bees, respectively. Because per-visit performances were similar, such disparities in importance were based largely on differences in relative abundance. Although the summed pollinator importance of Melandrena and Bombus was less than that of the honey bee, these, and other, wild pollinators have a role to play in filling future pollination gaps, and thus, warrant further study and conservation.
Highlights
Animal pollination is essential for sexual reproduction of many wild flowering plants and agricultural crops
As honey bee declines decrease the availability and increase the cost of honey bee pollination for apple growers, the question of whether growers can rely on wild bees to fill the pollination gap becomes increasingly relevant
Melandrena and Bombus contributed more to pollination than did Apis at two of our study orchards, the average importance of Melandrena and Bombus was small in comparison to Apis within the study region, due to the low relative abundances of these bees
Summary
Animal pollination is essential for sexual reproduction of many wild flowering plants and agricultural crops. Apple is visited by a diverse wild bee fauna in central New York (Gardner and Ascher 2006; Park et al 2015; Russo et al 2015). Among Andrena , species in the subgenus Melandrena (hereafter, referred to as Melandrena ) seem potentially important apple pollinators due to their large body size, early spring phenology, and abundance in eastern orchards (Brittain 1933; Gardner and Ascher 2006; Park et al 2010; Phillips 1933; Watson et al 2011). Apple growers generally consider Bombus bees as good pollinators for their ability to forage in low temperatures, common during apple’s spring bloom (Brittain 1935). Despite indirect evidence that both Melandrena and Bombus are good pollinators of apple, previous studies have not documented per-visit contributions of specific wild pollinators to apple’s reproductive success nor have previous studies quantified their regional importance in apple pollination (for exception, see Brittain 1933)
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