Abstract
Land transformation in the tropical rainforests to monoculture plantations leads to biodiversity loss and abiotic change. In the oil palm and rubber plantations of Sumatra, we explored the foraging behavior of stingless bees Lepidotrigona terminata, Sundatrigona moorei, and Tetragonula drescheri. Pollen was collected from bees returning to the nest to investigate the floral resources collected by bees inside and outside research plots from both types of plantations. Foraging behavior in both plantations showed an increase in the number of individuals returning to the nest with pollen as the morning progressed, followed by a gradual decrease in the afternoon. The foraging behavior of each stingless bee species was influenced by different environmental factors. While the activity of S. moorei was positively correlated with humidity, the activity of L. terminate was negatively correlated with temperature. We found that a single pollen load was dominated by a single plant taxon in all bee species in both plantations. All pollen collected in the rubber plantation was from Hevea brasiliensis, suggests that rubber is a potential pollen resource. However, in the oil palm plantation, Asteraceae pollen was the dominant taxon collected by both L. terminata and S. moorei. The comparison to the plant inventories in the plots suggests that almost half of the pollen collected by these two species in the oil palm hives was from outside the plantations, probably in forested patches and surrounding gardens. Finally, based on multivariate analyses, we found no competition for these floral resources between L. terminata and S. moorei.
Highlights
The lowland tropical rainforests of Sumatra, Indonesia, are regarded as highly diverse ecosystems supporting a wide variety of species and providing numerous ecosystem functions (Dislich et al 2017)
L. terminata, and S. moorei were placed in the oil palm plantation and showed a similar foraging pattern for the observation time (Figure 3)
Almost all stingless bees showed the general pattern of foraging behavior in oil palm and rubber plantations, i.e. increasing numbers of returning individuals to the nest with pollen as the morning progressed, gradually decreasing in the afternoon
Summary
The lowland tropical rainforests of Sumatra, Indonesia, are regarded as highly diverse ecosystems supporting a wide variety of species and providing numerous ecosystem functions (Dislich et al 2017). The land transformation of rainforests to agriculture since the 1970s has resulted in highly-fragmented landscapes (Drescher et al 2016). The effects of such changes in land use include loss of ecosystem services and functions essential for human livelihoods (Clough et al 2016; Dislich et al 2017; Drescher et al 2016). In the lowlands of the province of Jambi, two of the most common crops are oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) and rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) as monocultures. The decline of pollinators is associated with these landscape modifications (Kovács-Hostyánszki et al 2017)
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