Abstract
Insect pollination is among the most essential ecosystem services for humanity. Globally, bees are the most effective pollinators, and tropical bees are also important for maintaining tropical biodiversity. Despite their invaluable pollination service, basic distributional patterns of tropical bees along elevation gradients are globally scarce. Here, we surveyed bees at 100 m elevation intervals from 800 to 1100 m elevation in Costa Rica to test if bee abundance, community composition and crop visitor assemblages differed by elevation. We found that 18 of 24 bee species spanning three tribes that represented the most abundantly collected bee species showed abundance differences by elevation, even within this narrow elevational gradient. Bee assemblages at the two crop species tested, avocado and squash, showed community dissimilarity between high and low elevations, and elevation was a significant factor in explaining bee community composition along the gradient. Stingless bees (Tribe Meliponini) were important visitors to both crop species, but there was a more diverse assemblage of bees visiting avocado compared to squash. Our findings suggest that successful conservation of tropical montane bee communities and pollination services will require knowledge of which elevations support the highest numbers of each species, rather than species full altitudinal ranges.
Highlights
Lacking information on species richness, taxonomy, distribution, population dynamics and how climate change and other threats may impact topical bee species and bee pollination s ervices[10]
With only a handful of studies we are still lacking a complete understanding of bee abundance patterns along tropical mountains, especially at mid-elevations where weather patterns are less severe, and in seasonally-arid systems which may be more favorable for bees
We surveyed wild bee communities at 100 m elevation intervals along three spatially independent, replicate elevational gradients that include two life zones; a lower zone consisting of tropical dry forest (DF; 750–949 m elevation), and an upper zone consisting of tropical premontane forest (PMF; 950–1150 m elevation; see Supplementary Fig. S1 online) within the seasonally dry Northern Pacific Slope of Costa Rica
Summary
Lacking information on species richness, taxonomy, distribution, population dynamics and how climate change and other threats may impact topical bee species and bee pollination s ervices[10]. Bees of the Pacific slopes of Central America are among the most at-risk taxa globally, facing many threats from climate change, including the decoupling of interaction partners, widowhood, desiccation, and shifting ranges upslope to novel temperature or precipitation regimes and novel c ommunities[15,16,17,18]. We used the replicate elevational gradients to ask: (1) if bee abundance and community composition differ by elevation, (2) what seasonal changes (wet season vs dry season) in abundance and community composition are observed, and (3) how bee community composition of two economically important crop species changes along the elevational gradient and between the crops To answer these questions, we focused on the western honey bee (Apis mellifera) and 29 native bee species from the two bee tribes, Ceratinini and Meliponini. We present the abundances of the 30 bee species collected from an additional elevation (0 m elevation) and forest type (Tropical Wet Forest) in Southwestern Costa Rica as supporting information for the bee species full altitudinal ranges
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