Pollinator-friendly management does not increase the diversity of farmland bees and wasps

By T. Wood, John M. Holland, Dave Goulson. 2015

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In order to reverse declines in pollinator populations, numerous agri-environment schemes have been implemented across Europe, predominantly focused on increasing the availability of floral resources. Whilst several studies have investigated how bees and wasps (aculeates) respond to management at the scale of the scheme (i.e. within the flower patch) there has been little assessment of how schemes affect diversity at the farm scale. In the current work we assessed whether farms implementing flower-rich schemes had richer aculeate communities than farms without such habitats. A total of 104 species of bee and 44 species of aculeate wasp were recorded. Farms providing flower-rich habitats had significantly greater floral abundance but there were no differences in the total number of aculeate or flowering plant species recorded compared to farms without these habitats. After accounting for differences in sample size, and contrary to expectations, farms without flower-rich habitats were significantly richer in aculeate and flowering plant species. Bumblebees (Bombus spp.) and honeybees (Apis mellifera) foraged strongly from sown flowers, but the majority of bee species preferred wild plants that are not included in flower-rich schemes such as Heracleum sphondylium, Hypochaeris radicata and Tripleurospermum inodorum. The creation of pollinator-friendly habitats has not increased the diversity of flowering plants and such schemes will consequently only benefit a limited suite of aculeate species. If diverse aculeate communities are to be retained and restored on farmland, agri-environment schemes that provide foraging and nesting resources for a wider range of pollinator species must be developed.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/57380c83f062bbad3411feb80a3b2fa1e54e7d64

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

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Citations in the corpus

Pollination reservoirs for wild bee habitat enhancement in cropping systems: a review (2017, background): “At least three more provide clear evidence of positive bee population-level effects when PRs are present (Morandin and Kremen 2013a; Ponisio, M’Gonigle, and Kremen 2015; Wood et al. 2015a).”
Pollen nutrients better explain bumblebee colony development than pollen diversity (2017, background): “Field studies have questioned this strategy by showing that pollinator diversity is not always positively influenced by the plant diversity proposed in agroenvironment schemes (Wood et al., 2015).”
Protecting an ecosystem service: approaches to understanding and mitigating threats to wild insect pollinators (2016, background): “Therefore, a 985 better option may be to supplement existing habitats that also support insect pollinator 986 communities (Franzen and Nilsson, 2008; Ricketts et al., 2008; Wood et al., 2015a).”
Landscape impacts on pollinator communities in temperate systems: evidence and knowledge gaps (2017, unknown): “However, the ability of AES to enhance the reproduction of non-bumblebee taxa is unknown and it appears that AES are most beneﬁcial to generalist pollinators such as bumblebees and honeybees (Wood, Holland & Goulson 2015).”