The foraging behavior of social wasps may vary throughout the day in response to different factors, including environmental variation and interspecific interactions. Body size is known to play a critical role in determining daily activity patterns in ecological communities. However, the body size characteristics of most species of social wasps is poorly known, as well the relationship between body size and foraging schedules. In this study, we evaluated the extent to which body size determines the patterns of daily activity in a community of social wasps. We found a high temporal overlap in most of the species pairs tested. The pattern of daily foraging activity fits a bimodal distribution for the majority of the species. Moreover, we found a relationship between body and foraging time; in general, smaller species tended to begin foraging in the early hours of the morning, in contrast to larger wasps, which began foraging later. These results suggest that patterns of foraging activity in social wasps are likely to be the result of complex interactions between many different factors, including body size.
Approximately half of the tropical forests are seasonally dry tropical forests (SDTFs); they range from open scrub vegetation rich in succulent plants and deciduous trees to patches of mesic forests, particularly along rivers, mountain slopes, and peaks (Muscarella et al., 2019;Pennington et al., 2009;Prado, 2003). The specific characteristics of forests in different regions depend mainly on the historical length of dry periods and local conditions related to the
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