Abstract
As landscapes have become increasingly dominated by intensive agricultural production, plant diversity has declined steeply along with communities of pollinating insects including bees. Semi-natural habitats, such as field edge meadows and hedgerows, can be maintained to provide a diversity of flowering plants that can increase floral resources required by bees. An additional habitat enhancement practice is that of sowing strips of native prairie vegetation within row-cropped fields. In this study, conducted in Iowa, USA, we found that increases in both the abundance and diversity of floral resources in strips of native prairie vegetation within agricultural production fields greatly and positively influenced the bee community. The benefits to the bee community were important for both common and uncommon species and the effect may be strongest early in the season. Using networks of co-occurrence between plant and bee species, we were able to identify two native prairie plants, Ratibida pinnata and Zizia aurea, as potentially keystone resources that can be used to support native bees. When we evaluated the effect of reconstructed prairie strips on bees in the context of the surrounding landscape, we found that these conservation practices had positive effects on bees in agriculturally-dominated areas and that these effects were detectable in low to high complexity landscapes with 8–69% natural habitat. In landscapes dominated by crops with few pollen and nectar resources the inclusion of native prairie strips can buffer the decline of bees and effectively increase bee abundance and diversity.
Highlights
Landscapes that have become dominated by crop production, those crops with no dependence on animal pollination [1,2], have experienced declines in communities of native bees including unmanaged wild bees or non-Apis species [3], and other wild bee species important for pollination services [2,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]
We examined the benefit of native prairie vegetation sown in corn and soybean fields for common and uncommon bee species at four sites within the state of Iowa
Individuals placed in the subgenus Lasioglossum (Dialictus) very likely represented many unidentified species, but were ubiquitous among our experimental sites, and were treated as a single taxon. This taxon constituted >1% of relative abundance of the entire community, and we considered them as common species and added a second class of common species that included Lasioglossum (Dialictus), which will be referred to as ‘9 common bees’ hereafter
Summary
Landscapes that have become dominated by crop production, those crops with no dependence on animal pollination [1,2], have experienced declines in communities of native bees including unmanaged wild bees or non-Apis species [3], and other wild bee species important for pollination services [2,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. Kleijn et al [14] found that common bee species, those that constitute 2% or more of the relative abundance of individuals within communities, can provide as much as 80% of crop pollination services. These common species are important for pollination of crop species used for edible oils, protein, nuts, stimulants, fruits, and vegetables [6].
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