Neotropical bee microbiomes point to a fragmented social core and strong species-level effects.

Background: Individuals that band together create new ecological opportunities for microorganisms. In vertical transmission, theory predicts a conserved microbiota within lineages, especially social bees. Bees exhibit solitary to social behavior among and/or within species, while life cycles can be annual or perennial.

Description of a new ant- and stingless-bee-loving species of Cryptostigma Ferris (Hemiptera: Coccomorpha: Coccidae) from Ecuador living inside internodes of Cecropia (Urticaceae), with an updated key to the adult females and first-instar nymphs of the genus.

A new soft scale species, Cryptostigma cecropiaphilum Kondo & Roubik, sp. nov. (Hemiptera: Coccomorpha: Coccidae), is described from specimens collected from inside hollow branches (internodes) of Cecropia ficifolia Warb.

Stingless Bee (Apidae: Apinae: Meliponini) Ecology.

Stingless bees form perennial colonies of honey-making insects. The >600 species of stingless bees, mainly Neotropical, live throughout tropical latitudes. Foragers influence floral biology, plant reproduction, microbe dispersal, and diverse ecosystem functions.

Size-dependent Scaling of Stingless Bee Flight Metabolism Reveals an Energetic Benefit to Small Body Size.

Understanding the effect of body size on flight costs is critical for development of models of aerodynamics and animal energetics. Prior scaling studies that have shown that flight costs scale hypometrically have focused primarily on larger (> 100 mg) insects and birds, but most flying species are smaller. We studied the flight physiology of thirteen stingless bee species over a large range of body sizes (1-115 mg).

The importance of insects on land and in water: a tropical view.

Tropical insects are astonishingly diverse and abundant yet receive only marginal scientific attention. In natural tropical settings, insects are involved in regulating and supporting ecosystem services including seed dispersal, pollination, organic matter decomposition, nutrient cycling, herbivory, food webs and water quality, which in turn help fulfill UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Current and future global changes that affect insect diversity and distribution could disrupt key ecosystem services and impose important threats on ecosystems and human well-being.

Colony-level non-associative plasticity of alarm responses in the stingless honey bee, Tetragonisca angustula.

In ants, bees, and other social Hymenoptera alarm pheromones are widely employed to coordinate colony nest defense. In that context, alarm pheromones elicit innate species-specific defensive behaviors. Therefore, in terms of classical conditioning, an alarm pheromone could act as an unconditioned stimulus (US).

Coupling of pollination services and coffee suitability under climate change.

Climate change will cause geographic range shifts for pollinators and major crops, with global implications for food security and rural livelihoods. However, little is known about the potential for coupled impacts of climate change on pollinators and crops. Coffee production exemplifies this issue, because large losses in areas suitable for coffee production have been projected due to climate change and because coffee production is dependent on bee pollination.

Impact of Striped-Squirrel Nectar-Robbing Behaviour on Gender Fitness in Alpinia roxburghii Sweet (Zingiberaceae).

Nectar-robbing has the potential to strongly affect male and female reproductive fitness of plants. One example of nectar theft is that shown by striped-squirrels (Tamiops swinhoei) on a number of ginger species, including Alpinia roxburghii and A. kwangsiensis (Zingiberaceae).

Arthropod Distribution in a Tropical Rainforest: Tackling a Four Dimensional Puzzle.

Quantifying the spatio-temporal distribution of arthropods in tropical rainforests represents a first step towards scrutinizing the global distribution of biodiversity on Earth. To date most studies have focused on narrow taxonomic groups or lack a design that allows partitioning of the components of diversity. Here, we consider an exceptionally large dataset (113,952 individuals representing 5,858 species), obtained from the San Lorenzo forest in Panama, where the phylogenetic breadth of arthropod taxa was surveyed using 14 protocols targeting the soil, litter, understory, lower and upper canopy habitats, replicated across seasons in 2003 and 2004.

Setting the pace of life: membrane composition of flight muscle varies with metabolic rate of hovering orchid bees.

Patterns of metabolic rate variation have been documented extensively in animals, but their functional basis remains elusive. The membrane pacemaker hypothesis proposes that the relative abundance of polyunsaturated fatty acids in membrane phospholipids sets the metabolic rate of organisms. Using species of tropical orchid bees spanning a 16-fold range in body size, we show that the flight muscles of smaller bees have more linoleate (%18 : 3) and stearate (%18 : 0), but less oleate (%18 : 1).

Detecting insect pollinator declines on regional and global scales.

Recently there has been considerable concern about declines in bee communities in agricultural and natural habitats. The value of pollination to agriculture, provided primarily by bees, is >$200 billion/year worldwide, and in natural ecosystems it is thought to be even greater. However, no monitoring program exists to accurately detect declines in abundance of insect pollinators; thus, it is difficult to quantify the status of bee communities or estimate the extent of declines.

Arthropod diversity in a tropical forest.

Most eukaryotic organisms are arthropods. Yet, their diversity in rich terrestrial ecosystems is still unknown. Here we produce tangible estimates of the total species richness of arthropods in a tropical rainforest.

Large-range movements of neotropical orchid bees observed via radio telemetry.

Neotropical orchid bees (Euglossini) are often cited as classic examples of trapline-foragers with potentially extensive foraging ranges. If long-distance movements are habitual, rare plants in widely scattered locations may benefit from euglossine pollination services. Here we report the first successful use of micro radio telemetry to track the movement of an insect pollinator in a complex and forested environment.

A molecular phylogeny of the stingless bee genus Melipona (Hymenoptera: Apidae).

Stingless bees (Meliponini) constitute a diverse group of highly eusocial insects that occur throughout tropical regions around the world. The meliponine genus Melipona is restricted to the New World tropics and has over 50 described species. Melipona, like Apis, possesses the remarkable ability to use representational communication to indicate the location of foraging patches.

Allometric scaling of flight energetics in orchid bees: evolution of flux capacities and flux rates.

The evolution of metabolic pathways involved in energy production was studied in the flight muscles of 28 species of orchid bees. Previous work revealed that wingbeat frequencies and mass-specific metabolic rates decline in parallel by threefold as body mass increases interspecifically over a 20-fold range. We investigated the correlated evolution of metabolic rates during hovering flight and the flux capacities, i.

Allometric scaling of flight energetics in Panamanian orchid bees: a comparative phylogenetic approach.

The relationship between body size and flight energetics was studied in the clade of tropical orchid bees, in order to investigate energy metabolism and evolution. Body mass, which varied from 47 to 1065 mg, was found to strongly affect hovering flight mass-specific metabolic rates, which ranged from 114 ml CO(2) h(-1) g(-1) in small species to 37 ml CO(2) h(-1) g(-1) in large species. Similar variation of wingbeat frequency in hovering flight occurred among small to large species, and ranged from 250 to 86 Hz.

Energy metabolism in orchid bee flight muscles: carbohydrate fuels all.

The widely accepted idea that bees fuel flight through the oxidation of carbohydrate is based on studies of only a few species. We tested this hypothesis as part of our research program to investigate the size-dependence of flight energetics in Panamanian orchid bees. We succeeded in measuring rates of O(2) consumption and CO(2) production in vivo during hovering flight, as well as maximal activities (V(max) values) in vitro of key enzymes in flight muscle energy metabolism in nine species belonging to four genera.

Long-distance gene flow and cross-Andean dispersal of lowland rainforest bees (Apidae: Euglossini) revealed by comparative mitochondrial DNA phylogeography.

Euglossine bees (Apidae; Euglossini) exclusively pollinate hundreds of orchid species and comprise up to 25% of bee species richness in neotropical rainforests. As one of the first studies of comparative phylogeography in a neotropical insect group, we performed a mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA)-based analysis of 14 euglossine species represented by populations sampled across the Andes and/or across the Amazon basin. The mtDNA divergences within species were consistently low; across the 12 monophyletic species the mean intraspecific divergence among haplotypes was 0.

Use of diploid male frequency data as an indicator of pollinator decline.

Pollination deficits in agricultural and natural systems are suggestive of large reductions in pollinator populations. However, actual declines are difficult to demonstrate using census data. Here, we show census data to be misleading because many abundant pollinators exhibit high levels of production of sterile diploid males usually found only in small inbred hymenopteran populations; Euglossa imperialis exhibits high levels of diploid male production induced by low effective population sizes (Ne approximately 15), despite being the most abundant orchid bee in lowland tropical forests in Panama.

The value of bees to the coffee harvest.

The self-pollinating African shrub Coffea arabica, a pillar of tropical agriculture, was considered to gain nothing from insect pollinators. But I show here that naturalized, non-native honeybees can augment pollination and boost crop yields by over 50%. These findings, together with world coffee-harvest statistics and results from field studies of organically shade-grown coffee, indicate that coffee plants would benefit from being grown in habitats that are suitable for sustaining valuable pollinators.

Roles of nectar robbers in reproduction of the tropical treelet Quassia amara (Simaroubaceae).

Different subsets of mainland nectarivores visited Quassia amara (Simaroubaceae), a self-compatible, predominately bird-pollinated treelet, at three islands and the mainland in Panamá. Factors correlated with reproductive success, defined as seed to ovule ratio, included the species pollinating and robbing flowers, visitor activity, pollinator response to nectar robbing, and internal regulation of fruit production. The absence of robbers and former pollinators on an island separated from the mainland during the holocene was associated with shifts in flower size, nectar production, and 3-4fold increases in population reproductive success and pollinator efficiency (=seeds produced per visit).

Nectar selection by Melipona and Apis mellifera (Hymenoptera: Apidae) and the ecology of nectar intake by bee colonies in a tropical forest.

Colony foraging activity of four Melipona species (Apidae: Meliponinae, tribe Meliponini) was studied during the dry season, when many plants flower in central Panama. The efficiency of sucrose solution uptake by Melipona was compared to that of domesticated European Apis mellifera. Dynamics of nectar foraging were also recorded for 3 of the Melipona visiting the forest shrub, Hybanthus prunifolius (Violaceae).