The nectar report: Quantitative review of nectar sugar concentrations offered by bee visited flowers in agricultural and non-agricultural landscapes
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Agricultural Science, Conservation Biology, Ecology
- Keywords
- nectar quality, hymenoptera, flower resources
- Copyright
- © 2018 Pamminger et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. The nectar report: Quantitative review of nectar sugar concentrations offered by bee visited flowers in agricultural and non-agricultural landscapes. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27291v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27291v1
Abstract
There is growing concern that some bee populations are in decline potentially threatening pollination security in agricultural and non-agricultural landscapes. Among the numerous causes associated with this trend nutritional stress, resulting from a mismatch between bee nutritional needs and plant community provisioning, has been suggested as one potential driver. To ease nutritional stress on bee populations in agricultural habitats, agri-environmental protection schemes aim to provide alternative nutritional resources for bee populations during times of need. However, such efforts have focused mainly on quantity (providing flowering plants) and timing (flower-scarce periods), while largely ignoring the quality of the offered flower resources. In a first step to start addressing this information gap we have compiled a comprehensive geographically explicit dataset on nectar quality (i.e. total sugar concentration), offered to bees both within fields (crop and weed species) as well as off field (wild) around the globe. We find that the total nectar sugar concentrations in general do not differ between the three plant communities studied. In contrast we find increased quality variability in the wild plant community compared to crop and weed community, which is likely explained by the increased phylogenetic diversity in this category of plants. In a second step we explore the influence of local habitat on nectar quality and its variability utilizing a detailed sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) data set and find that geography has a small, but significant influence on these parameters. In a third step we identify crop groups (genera), which provide sub-optimal nectar resources for bees and suggest high quality alternatives as potential nectar supplements. In the long term this data base could serve as a starting point to systematically collect more quality characteristics of plant provided resources to bees, which ultimately can be utilized by scientist, regulators, NGOs and farmers to improve the flower resources offered to bees. We hope that ultimately this data will help to ease nutritional stress for bee populations and foster a data informed discussion about pollinator conservation in modern agricultural landscapes.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.