Automated entrance monitoring to investigate honey bee foraging trips using open-source wireless platform and fiducial tags.

Honey bee foraging is a complex behavior because it involves tens of thousands of organisms making decisions about where to collect pollen and nectar based on the quality of resources and the distance to flowers. Studying this aspect of their biology is possible through direct observations but the large number of individuals involved in this behavior makes the implementation of technologies ideal to scale up this type of study. Consequently, there is a need for instruments that can facilitate accurate assessments of honey bee foraging at the colony level.

Adapting to change: bee pollinator signatures in anthropized environments.

Bees are essential pollinators for wild, ornamental, and agricultural plants, but human activities have disrupted their habitats, threatening their persistence. Although bees face numerous challenges in habitats heavily modified by human activities, certain species persist and thrive there. This review synthesizes recent literature on two types of traits that help bees survive in human-modified environments: preadaptive traits, which evolved before these environments existed, and adaptive traits, which have evolved in response to new conditions.

Mating frequency estimation and its importance for colony abundance analyses in eusocial pollinators: a case study of Bombus impatiens (Hymenoptera: Apidae).

The genus Bombus (bumble bees) includes approximately 265 species, many of which are in decline in North America and Europe. To estimate colony abundance of bumble bees in natural and agricultural habitats, sibship relationships are often reconstructed from genetic data with the assumption that colonies have 1 monandrous queen. However, some species such as the North American common eastern bumble bee (Bombus impatiens Cresson) can display low levels of polyandry, which may bias estimates of colony abundance based on monandrous sibship reconstructions.

Simulation of early season herbivory via mechanical damage affects flower production in pumpkin (Cucurbita pepo ssp. pepo).

Background: Damage from insect herbivores can elicit a wide range of plant responses, including reduced or compensatory growth, altered volatile profiles, or increased production of defence compounds. Specifically, herbivory can alter floral development as plants reallocate resources towards defence and regrowth functions. For pollinator-dependent species, floral quantity and quality are critical for attracting floral visitors; thus, herbivore-induced developmental effects that alter either floral abundance or attractiveness may have critical implications for plant reproductive success.

Bee monitoring by community scientists: comparing a collections-based program with iNaturalist.

Bee monitoring, or widespread efforts to document bee community biodiversity, can involve data collection using lethal (specimen collections) or non-lethal methods (observations, photographs). Additionally, data can be collected by professional scientists or by volunteer participants from the general public. Collection-based methods presumably produce more reliable data with fewer biases against certain taxa, while photography-based approaches, such as data collected from public natural history platforms like iNaturalist, can involve more people and cover a broader geographic area.

Diet specialization mediates drivers of herbivory in a semi-arid agroecosystem.

Herbivory is a major fitness pressure for plants and a key driver of crop losses in agroecosystems. Dense monocultures are expected to favor specialist herbivorous insects, particularly those who primarily consume crop species; yet, levels and types of herbivory are not uniform within regional cropping systems. It is essential to determine which local and regional ecological factors drive variation in herbivory in order to support functional agroecosystems that rely less on chemical inputs.

Plant Virus Impacts on Yield and Plant-Pollinator Interactions Are Phylogenetically Modulated Independently of Domestication in spp.

Plant defenses are conserved among closely related species, but domestication can alter host genotypes through artificial selection with potential losses in host defenses. Therefore, both domestication and host phylogenetic structure may influence plant virus infection outcomes. Here, we examined the association of phylogeny and domestication with the fitness of infected plants.

Body mass, temperature, and pathogen intensity differentially affect critical thermal maxima and their population-level variation in a solitary bee.

Climate change presents a major threat to species distribution and persistence. Understanding what abiotic or biotic factors influence the thermal tolerances of natural populations is critical to assessing their vulnerability under rapidly changing thermal regimes. This study evaluates how body mass, local climate, and pathogen intensity influence heat tolerance and its population-level variation (SD) among individuals of the solitary bee .

Systemic pesticides in a solitary bee pollen food store affect larval development and increase pupal mortality.

Solitary bees are often exposed to various pesticides applied for pest control on farmland while providing pollination services to food crops. Increasing evidence suggests that sublethal toxicity of agricultural pesticides affects solitary bees differently than the social bees used to determine regulatory thresholds, such as honey bees and bumblebees. Studies on solitary bees are challenging because of the difficulties in obtaining large numbers of eggs or young larvae for bioassays.

A longitudinal experiment demonstrates that honey bee colonies managed organically are as healthy and productive as those managed conventionally.

Honey bee colony management is critical to mitigating the negative effects of biotic and abiotic stressors. However, there is significant variation in the practices implemented by beekeepers, which results in varying management systems. This longitudinal study incorporated a systems approach to experimentally test the role of three representative beekeeping management systems (conventional, organic, and chemical-free) on the health and productivity of stationary honey-producing colonies over 3 years.

The expansion of agriculture has shaped the recent evolutionary history of a specialized squash pollinator.

The expansion of agriculture is responsible for the mass conversion of biologically diverse natural environments into managed agroecosystems dominated by a handful of genetically homogeneous crop species. Agricultural ecosystems typically have very different abiotic and ecological conditions from those they replaced and create potential niches for those species that are able to exploit the abundant resources offered by crop plants. While there are well-studied examples of crop pests that have adapted into novel agricultural niches, the impact of agricultural intensification on the evolution of crop mutualists such as pollinators is poorly understood.

Osmia taurus (Hymenoptera: Megachilidae): A Non-native Bee Species With Invasiveness Potential in North America.

Bees are important pollinators and are essential for the reproduction of many plants in natural and agricultural ecosystems. However, bees can have adverse ecological effects when introduced to areas outside of their native geographic ranges. Dozens of non-native bee species are currently found in North America and have raised concerns about their potential role in the decline of native bee populations.

The diversity, evolution, and development of setal morphologies in bumble bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae: spp.).

Bumble bees are characterized by their thick setal pile that imparts aposematic color patterns often used for species-level identification. Like all bees, the single-celled setae of bumble bees are branched, an innovation thought important for pollen collection. To date no studies have quantified the types of setal morphologies and their distribution on these bees, information that can facilitate understanding of their adaptive ecological function.

Squash bees host high diversity and prevalence of parasites in the northeastern United States.

The squash bee Eucera (Peponapis) pruinosa is emerging as a model species to study how stressors impact solitary wild bees in North America. Here, we describe the prevalence of trypanosomes, microsporidians and mollicute bacteria in E. pruinosa and two other species, Bombus impatiens and Apis mellifera, that together comprise over 97% of the pollinator visitors of Cucurbita agroecosystems in Pennsylvania (United States).

Six years of wild bee monitoring shows changes in biodiversity within and across years and declines in abundance.

Wild bees form diverse communities that pollinate plants in both native and agricultural ecosystems making them both ecologically and economically important. The growing evidence of bee declines has sparked increased interest in monitoring bee community and population dynamics using standardized methods. Here, we studied the dynamics of bee biodiversity within and across years by monitoring wild bees adjacent to four apple orchard locations in Southern Pennsylvania, USA.

Honey bee viruses are highly prevalent but at low intensities in wild pollinators of cucurbit agroecosystems.

Managed and wild bee populations are in decline around the globe due to several biotic and abiotic stressors. Pathogenic viruses associated with the Western honey bee (Apis mellifera) have been identified as key contributors to losses of managed honey bee colonies, and are known to be transmitted to wild bee populations through shared floral resources. However, little is known about the prevalence and intensity of these viruses in wild bee populations, or how bee visitation to flowers impacts viral transmission in agroecosystems.

Overlap of Ecological Niche Breadth of Euglossa cordata and Eulaema nigrita (Hymenoptera, Apidae, Euglossini) Accessed by Pollen Loads and Species Distribution Modeling.

Urban areas can serve as biodiversity refuges for pollinators because of the high diversity of available floral and nesting resources. However, it remains unclear what plant species commonly used for urban landscaping provide floral resources that pollinators actively use. Here, we integrate data from the pollen and species distribution models of two abundant euglossine bees-the large-bodied Eulaema nigrita (Lepeletier, 1841) and the small-bodied Euglossa cordata (Linnaeus, 1758)-in urban areas to investigate their overlap in diet breadth and distribution.

Correction to 'Introduced bees () collect pollen from both coevolved and novel host-plant species within their family-level phylogenetic preferences'.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1098/rsos.200225.

Introduced bees () collect pollen from both coevolved and novel host-plant species within their family-level phylogenetic preferences.

Studying the pollen preferences of introduced bees allows us to investigate how species use host-plants when establishing in new environments. is a solitary bee introduced into North America from East Asia for pollination of Rosaceae crops such as apples and cherries. We investigated whether (i) more frequently collected pollen from host-plant species they coevolved with from their geographic origin, or (ii) prefer host-plant species of specific plant taxa independent of origin.

A new ingestion bioassay protocol for assessing pesticide toxicity to the adult Japanese orchard bee (Osmia cornifrons).

Adopting an Integrated Pest and Pollinator Management strategy requires an evaluation of pesticide risk for pollinator species. For non-Apid species, however, the standardized ingestion assays are difficult to implement. This hinders the consideration of non-Apid species in farm management strategies and government regulatory processes.

A glance of the blood stage transcriptome of a Southeast Asian Plasmodium ovale isolate.

Plasmodium ovale accounts for a disproportionate number of travel-related malaria cases. This parasite is understudied since there is a reliance on clinical samples. We collected a P.

Defining Pollinator Health: A Holistic Approach Based on Ecological, Genetic, and Physiological Factors.

Evidence for global bee population declines has catalyzed a rapidly evolving area of research that aims to identify the causal factors and to effectively assess the status of pollinator populations. The term pollinator health emerged through efforts to understand causes of bee decline and colony losses, but it lacks a formal definition. In this review, we propose a definition for pollinator health and synthesize the available literature on the application of standardized biomarkers to assess health at the individual, colony, and population levels.

A trait-based approach to predict population genetic structure in bees.

Understanding population genetic structure is key to developing predictions about species susceptibility to environmental change, such as habitat fragmentation and climate change. It has been theorized that life-history traits may constrain some species in their dispersal and lead to greater signatures of population genetic structure. In this study, we use a quantitative comparative approach to assess if patterns of population genetic structure in bees are driven by three key species-level life-history traits: body size, sociality, and diet breadth.

Special Issue: Honey Bee Research in the US: Current State and Solutions to Beekeeping Problems.

The European honey bee () is the most important managed species for agricultural pollination across the world [...