Few studies directly address the consequences of habitat fragmentation for communities of pollinating insects, particularly for the key pollinator group, bees (Hymenoptera: Apiformes). Bees typically live in habitats where nesting substrates and bloom are patchily distributed and spatially dissociated. Bee studies have all defined habitat fragments as remnant patches of floral hosts or forests,...

Concern over declining pollinators has led to multiple conservation initiatives for improving forage for bees in agroecosystems. Using data available through the Pollinator Library (npwrc.usgs.gov/pollinator/), we summarize plant-pollinator interaction data collected from 2012-2015 on lands managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and private lands enrolled in U.S. Department of Agricultur...

Can nocturnal bees really see so well with such tiny eyes? Remarkably yes. But there is no question that their visual systems are operating near the limit and that only the coarser and slower features of the world can be seen. Light intensity plays a deciding role in whether a particular bee species is able to forage or not — many species of bees that are capable of visual foraging in the early...

Imidacloprid is a neonicotinoid pesticide heavily used by the agricultural industry and shown to have negative impacts on honey bees above certain concentrations. We evaluated the effects of different imidacloprid concentrations in sugar syrup using cage and field studies, and across different environments. Honey bee colonies fed sublethal concentrations of imidicloprid (0, 5, 20 and 100 ppb) o...

Cold narcosis is commonly used for immobilizing bees and has been found to have no effect on mortality and fecundity in honeybees. We present the first study examining the effect of cold narcosis on recruitment and foraging in bumblebees. In a controlled laboratory setting, we observed that the number of foraging Bombus occidentalis, a New World bumblebee, increased after the focal forager retu...

Communication signals often vary between individuals, even when one expects selection to favour accuracy and precision, such as the honey bee waggle dance, where foragers communicate to nestmates the direction and distance to a resource. Although many studies have examined intra-dance variation, or the variation within a dance, less is known about inter-dance variation, or the variation between...

Thermoregulation plays a key role in bee foraging, allowing some species to forage in suboptimal temperatures. Recently, bumble bee thoracic temperature (T(th)) has been shown to increase with nectar carbohydrate content. However, pollen is also vital to bees and exhibits a greater than 20-fold range in protein quality. We provide the first demonstration that bee T(th) is also correlated with p...

Given widespread declines in pollinator communities and increasing global reliance on pollinator-dependent crops, there is an acute need to develop a mechanistic understanding of native pollinator population and foraging biology. Using a population genetics approach, we determine the impact of habitat and floral resource distributions on nesting and foraging patterns of a critical native pollin...

High annual losses of honey bees, as well as range reductions and local extinctions of wild and native pollinator species, are concerning because bees are important plant pollinators [1]. Approximately one-third of the typical Western diet requires bee pollination, and honey bees (Apis mellifera) are the primary pollinators of numerous food crops, including fruits, nuts, vegetables, and oilseed...

We previously characterized and quantified the influence of land use on survival and productivity of colonies positioned in six apiaries and found that colonies in apiaries surrounded by more land in uncultivated forage experienced greater annual survival, and generally more honey production. Here, detailed metrics of honey bee health were assessed over three years in colonies positioned in the...