Effects of experience and weather on foraging rate and pollen versus nectar collection in the bumblebee, Bombus terrestris

By J. Peat, Dave Goulson. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 2005

125 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study examines factors that affect foraging rate of free-flying bumblebees, Bombus terrestris, when collecting nectar, and also what factors determine whether they collect pollen or nectar. We show that nectar foraging rate (mass gathered per unit time) is positively correlated with worker size, in accordance with previous studies. It has been suggested that the greater foraging rate of large bees is due to their higher thermoregulatory capacity in cool conditions, but our data suggest that this is not so. Workers differing in size were not differentially affected by the weather. Regardless of size, naïve bees were poor foragers, often using more resources than they gathered. Foraging rate was not maximised until at least 30 trips had been made from the nest. Foraging rates were positively correlated with humidity, perhaps because nectar secretion rates were higher or evaporation of nectar lower at high humidity. Temperature, wind speed and cloud cover did not significantly influence foraging rate, within the summertime range that occurred during the study. Weather greatly influenced whether bees collected pollen or nectar. Pollen was preferably collected when it was warm, windy, and particularly when humidity was low; and preferably during the middle of the day. We suggest that bees collect pollen in dry conditions, and avoid collecting pollen when there is dew or rain-water droplets on the vegetation, which would make grooming pollen into the corbiculae difficult. Availability of sufficient dry days for pollen collection may be an important factor determining the success of bumblebee colonies.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b8d4bfe54e7a09d2ab32d117316f596b0be631aa

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Citations in the corpus

The same, but different: pollen foraging in honeybee and bumblebee colonies (2011, background): “Characterizing the amount of sugar added to pollen loads Pollen loads from bee legs also contain sugars because bees commonly mix pollen collected from flowers with nectar from their crops (Parker 1926; Roulston and Cane 2000; Leonhardt et al. 2007).”
Pollination services are mediated by bee functional diversity and landscape context (2015, background): “…minute) as well as foraging duration (average time spent visiting each flower), having first checked whether bees varied in their behavior in relation to the weather (Peat & Goulson 2005), floral densities (Heinrich 1979; Waddington 1980), apple variety, or foraging type (Thomson and Goodell 2001).”
Chronic impairment of bumblebee natural foraging behaviour induced by sublethal pesticide exposure (2014, background): “The volume of sucrose solution we provided colonies was c. 50% of the sugar that would be typically brought back by foragers (assuming colonies having an average of 9–10 foragers and each foraging for 8 h day 1: Peat & Goulson 2005; Raine & Chittka 2008; Gill, Ramos-Rodriguez & Raine 2012).”
Evidence for competition between honeybees and bumblebees; effects on bumblebee worker size (2009, background): “Large workers collect more food per unit time than do their smaller sisters (Goulson et al. 2002; Peat and Goulson 2005), in part because large workers have higher visual acuity and so are better able to swiftly Table 1 Numbers of each bumblebee species caught at each study site, and numbers of…”
Predictive modelling of honey bee foraging activity using local weather conditions (2018, background): “Bumble bees have been shown to preferentially collect pollen over nectar when the weather conditions at the foraging site are warm, dry and windy and to prefer nectar otherwise (Peat and Goulson 2005).”