Abstract
Bee population declines are often linked to human impacts, especially habitat and biodiversity loss, but empirical evidence is lacking. To clarify the link between biodiversity loss and bee decline, we examined how floral diversity affects (reproductive) fitness and population growth of a social stingless bee. For the first time, we related available resource diversity and abundance to resource (quality and quantity) intake and colony reproduction, over more than two years. Our results reveal plant diversity as key driver of bee fitness. Social bee colonies were fitter and their populations grew faster in more florally diverse environments due to a continuous supply of food resources. Colonies responded to high plant diversity with increased resource intake and colony food stores. Our findings thus point to biodiversity loss as main reason for the observed bee decline.
Highlights
Ongoing pollinator declines threaten spatial and temporal stability of pollination and global food production[1,2,3,4,5]
To understand the impact of biodiversity on bee fitness and population growth, we examined how floral resource diversity, abundance and nutritional quality affected stingless bees, i.e. highly social bees with perennial
Our study demonstrates that fitness and population growth of highly social bees is best explained by and positively correlated with plant diversity (Figs 1 and 2)
Summary
Ongoing pollinator declines threaten spatial and temporal stability of pollination and global food production[1,2,3,4,5]. Only a handful of studies have examined bee fitness in relation to flowering plant diversity[19,20,21,22,23,24,25] They all revealed that floral diversity positively affected colony growth or offspring production. For the globally distributed and often managed highly social bees, we still lack longer term data on colony reproduction or population growth in relation to food source diversity, abundance and nutritional quality. In this group, fitness and population growth are notoriously hard to quantify due to management bias (e.g. supplementary feeding) and long-lived colonies. We predicted that (iii) fitness and colony population growth would be affected by both the quantity and the nutritional quality of food stored by colonies
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