Contrasting responses of bee communities to coffee flowering at different spatial scales

By D. Veddeler, Alexandra-Maria Klein, T. Tscharntke. 2006

119 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While investigating biodiversity patterns on different spatial scales, ecological processes determining these patterns have been rarely analysed. Flower visitation by bees is an important ecological process that is related to floral resource availability. However, little is known about whether responses of bee communities to floral resource availability change at different spatial scales. We studied density and species richness of flower-visiting bees in relation to floral resource availability, provided by coffee, in traditional agroforestry systems on a field, shrub, and branch scale. On a field scale, mean bee density per shrub increased with decreasing proportion of flowering coffee shrubs per site, showing a dilution effect. Conversely, on shrub and branch scales bee density per shrub, or shrub part, increased with increasing number of inflorescences, showing a concentration effect. Additionally, bee density per shrub was higher on those that were only partly, rather than totally surrounded by other flowering coffee shrubs. Species richness of flower-visiting bees was positively affected by high resource availability on a shrub and a branch scale, expressed by a high number of inflorescences, but at the field scale the proportion of flowering shrubs per site did not have any effect on species richness. Our results show contrasting responses of the community of flower-visiting bees to floral resource availability, depending on the spatial scale considered. We conclude that patterns of flower-visiting bee communities of only one spatial scale can not be generalized, since the number of pollinators may be limited on a field scale, but not on smaller scales.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Insect Science, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/428f7909be7847f5a0a8a2bc55ef07ea7ab81c97

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Insect Science

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Citations in the corpus

Diversity of Pollinator Insects in Relation to Seed Set of Mustard (Brassica rapa L.: Cruciferae) (2007, background): “Dense flower patches seem to be the more attractive resource for many different bee species at smaller spatial scales (Veddeler et al. 2006).”
Impacts of coffee agroforestry management on tropical bee communities. (2010, background): “While past studies have documented the importance of flowering coffee and non-coffee understory plants for bee communities (Klein et al., 2003b; De Marco and Coelho, 2004; Veddeler et al., 2006), we found that shade trees were the most critical factors for native bee abundance and species richness w”
Landscape moderation of biodiversity patterns and processes ‐ eight hypotheses (2012, background): “In general, density dependence of species responses to resources may change dramatically with the spatial scale considered, and is a phenomenon which has rarely been studied (Veddeler et al., 2006).”