Dancing bees evaluate agricultural forage resources as inferior to central urban land
Samuelson et al., 2019
Samuelson et al., 2019
Recent evidence suggests that flower-rich areas within cities could play
an important role in pollinator conservation, but direct comparison of
agricultural and urban areas has proved challenging to perform over
large scales. Here we use the waggle dances of honeybees (Apis mellifera
L.) to evaluate floral resource availability over the entire season at
deeply urban or agricultural sites. Through analysis of 3378 dances that
were performed over two years by 20 colonies in SE England, we show
that foraging trip distance is consistently lower at urban sites across
the entire season, implying a higher availability of forage in heavily
urbanized areas. Urban bees also collected nectar with a higher mean
sugar content. From the self-reported perspective of a generalist
pollinator, the modern agricultural landscapes that we studied provided
insufficient and transient resources relative to heavily urbanised
areas, which may represent important refuges within an impoverished
landscape.
Example waggle dance plots from one urban site (BUR) and one agricultural site (YAL). Each circle shows the dances recorded on a single filming period (up to 3 hours) during spring (fortnight 3), summer (fortnight 6) and autumn (fortnight 11). Waggle dances are displayed as probability heatmaps generated from 1000 simulations of each dance allowing incorporation of variability in distance and angle communication 29. Dance plots are overlaid on GIS land-use maps (radius 2500m) produced for land-use preference analysis. For waggle dance plots for all 183 site-fortnight combinations.
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