The composition and richness of herbivore and plant assemblages change along climatic gradients, but knowledge about associated shifts in specialization is scarce and lacks controlling for the abundance and phylogeny…
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Diets maintained in a changing world: Does land-use intensification alter wild bee communities by selecting for flexible generalists?
Biodiversity loss, as often found in intensively managed agricultural landscapes, correlates with reduced ecosystem functioning, for example, pollination by insects, and with altered plant composition, diversity, and abundance. But how…
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Do amino and fatty acid profiles of pollen provisions correlate with bacterial microbiomes in the mason bee Osmia bicornis?
Bee performance and well-being strongly depend on access to sufficient and appropriate resources, in particular pollen and nectar of flowers, which constitute the major basis of bee nutrition. Pollen-derived microbes…
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Wild bee larval food composition in five European cities
Urbanization poses threats and opportunities for the biodiversity of wild bees. At the same time, cities can harbor diverse wild bee assemblages, partly due to the unique plant assemblages that…
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Critical links between biodiversity and health in wild bee conservation
Wild bee populations are declining due to human activities, such as land use change, which strongly affect the composition and diversity of available plants and food sources. The chemical composition of…
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Forest landscapes increase diversity of honeybee diets in the tropics
Honeybees (Apis mellifera) depend entirely on floral resources (pollen and nectar) in their surrounding landscape to satisfy their dietary needs. Honeybee diets in temperate areas have been well studied, and there…
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Preservation methods of honey bee-collected pollen are not a source of bias in ITS2 metabarcoding
Pollen metabarcoding is emerging as a powerful tool for ecological research and offers unprecedented scale in citizen science projects for environmental monitoring via honey bees. Biases in metabarcoding can be…
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Functional resin use in solitary bees
Overall, more than 30% of bee species depend on non-floral resources, such as resin. However, the importance of resin in bee ecology, particularly for solitary bees, has received very little…
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An integrative environmental pollen diversity assessment and its importance for the Sustainable Development Goals
Pollen is at once intimately part of the reproductive cycle of seed plants and simultaneously highly relevant for the environment (pollinators, vector for nutrients, or organisms), people (food safety and…
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How wild bees find a way in European cities: Pollen metabarcoding unravels multiple feeding strategies and their effects on distribution patterns in four wild bee species
Urban ecosystems can sustain populations of wild bees, partly because of their rich native and exotic floral resources. A better understanding of the urban bee diet, particularly at the larval…
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