Use of genetic markers to quantify bumblebee foraging range and nest density

By Ben Darvill, M. Knight, Dave Goulson. 2004

241 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Bumblebees (Hymenoptera: Apidae) are important pollinators of crops and wildflowers, but many species have suffered dramatic declines in recent decades. Strategies for their conservation require knowledge of their foraging range and nesting density, both of which are poorly understood. Previous studies have mainly focussed on the cosmopolitan bumblebee species Bombus terrestris, and implicitly assume this to be representative of other species. Here we use a landscape-scale microsatellite study to estimate the foraging range and nesting density of two ecologically dissimilar species, B. terrestris and B. pascuorum. Workers were sampled along a 10 km linear transect and 8-9 polymorphic microsatellite markers used to identify putative sisters. We provide the first published estimates of the number of colonies using a circle of radius 50 m in an agricultural landscape: 20.4 for B. terrestris and 54.7 for B. pascuorum. Estimates of nest density differed significantly between the two species: 13 km-2 for B. terrestris and 193 km-2 for B. pascuorum. Foraging ranges also differed substantially, with B. pascuorum foraging over distances less than 312 m and B. terrestris less than 625 m. Clearly bumblebee species differ greatly in fundamental aspects of their ecology. This has significant implications for the development of conservation strategies for rare bumblebees and isolated plant populations, for the management of bumblebees as pollinators, and for predicting patterns of gene flow from genetically modified plants.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/658f50e93d7b21bc117bee1c8618ae416f70983f

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Citations in the corpus

Adaptation, Genetic Drift, Pleiotropy, and History in the Evolution of Bee Foraging Behavior (2006, background): “The field site was typical central European bumblebee habitat, including dry grassland, deciduous forest, and farmland within the bees’ foraging range (Darvill et al., 2004; Dramstad, 1996; Osborne et al., 1999; Walther‐Hellwig and Frankl, 2000).”
Foraging trip duration of bumblebees in relation to landscape‐wide resource availability (2006, background): “The radius of 3000 m for the landscape sectors was chosen to cover the potential foraging range of B. terrestris ( Walther-Hellwig & Frankl, 2000; Darvill et al. , 2004; Knight et al. , 2005 ).”
A field experiment on the effect of Nosema bombi in colonies of the bumblebee Bombus terrestris (2008, background): “…a total of 28 colonies (placed in 14 pairs) were placed along the forest edge with a minimum distance of 5 m to the forest edge, and 10 – 15 m between colonies ( Darvill et al. , 2004 ); along the forest edge, the placement of a control and an infected experimental colony was always alternated.”
Declines in forage availability for bumblebees at a national scale (2006, background): “Given their relatively large foraging ranges (Darvill et al., 2004), bumblebees might be expected to be capable of adapting to these local-scale reductions in forage, if sufficient resources persisted elsewhere within their population range.”
Evidence for competition between honeybees and bumblebees; effects on bumblebee worker size (2009, background): “It has certainly been domesticated for at least 4,000 years (Crane 1990a), and has been introduced to more-or-less every country in the world.”
Plight of the bumble bee: Pathogen spillover from commercial to wild populations (2006, background): “These three areas included roadside ditches and old fields and were within 500 m of at least one commercial greenhouse, which is well within the maximum distance that bumble bees travel from the colony to forage (Goulson and Stout, 2001; Darvill et al., 2004 ).”
Interacting effects of farming practice and landscape context on bumble bees (2008, background): “…shown to be associated with the size of their foraging ranges (Westphal et al., 2006), so that bumble bee species with large colonies have larger foraging ranges compared to those with smaller colonies (Walther-Hellwig and Frankl, 2000; Goulson, 2003; Darvill et al., 2004; Westphal et al., 2006).”
Biodiversity, species interactions and ecological networks in a fragmented world (2012, background): “Large body size reflects the capacity to fly longer distances, and genetic markers and radio-tracking techniques are increasingly used to estimate actual flight distances (Darvill et al., 2004; Hagen et al., 2011).”
Bee foraging ranges and their relationship to body size (2007, methodology): “The relatively low predictive power of this relationship may have been due to the choice of body length as a measure of bee size and the lack of consistency in Weld and statistical techniques between datasets.”
Does intraspecific size variation in bumblebees allow colonies to efficiently exploit different flowers? (2005, background): “lucorum in the same area suggest that the field classifications used for these species are > 95% accurate (Darvill et al., 2004).”