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S.. 2017. Bumblebee family lineage survival is enhanced in high-quality landscapes. Nature, 543 (7646). 547-549. 10.1038/nature21709Contact CEH NORA team at noraceh@ceh.ac.ukThe NERC and CEH trademarks and logos ('the Trademarks') are registered trademarks of NERC in the UK and other countries, and may not be used without the prior written consent of the Trademark owner. 1Bumblebee family lineage survival is enhanced in high quality landscapes Main textThe loss of semi-natural habitats and floral resources within intensively managed agricultural landscapes has been identified as a major driver of declines in insect pollinators 3,9,10 , with negative consequences for crop pollination 11 . Habitat restoration (e.g. the planting of flowering hedgerows, meadows or flower strips along field margins under agri-environment schemes 12 )can mitigate these effects, increasing local pollinator abundance and species richness 13-15 and enhancing rates of persistence and colonization at the community level 16 . However, we lack understanding of the effects of restoration on key aspects of pollinator biology that may explain the mechanisms behind these responses. In particular, improving habitat quality might be expected to enhance the prospects of successful reproduction and between-year survival in targeted areas, but whether this occurs is unknown.3 Bumblebees (Bombus spp.) are key pollinators of wild flowers and commercial crops 17,18 .Following a eusocial, annual colony cycle, new queens enter hibernation in the autumn and emerge in spring to search for a nest site and found a colony. Each colony may produce up to several hundred 'daughter' workers, which forage from spring to summer at flowers for nectar and pollen to rear new daughter queens and males 19 . The survival and dispersal patterns of bumblebee queens during hibernation and nest-searching periods are critical to overall population persistence, but remain undescribed in wild populations 8,20,21 . In addition, although the availability of floral resources within foraging distance of the nest has been shown to increase numbers of workers and males produced per colony, effects on queen production have been less clear 22 and there is no evidence regarding how queen production, survival and dispersal may be linked with underlying habitat quality and land-use 23 .Here, we investigated the effects of habitat quality and land-use on bumblebee survival and dispersal between colony cycle stages across two years. We first tested whether colonies located within or near high-value foraging habitats had a greater probability of producing daughter queens that survive the winter hibernation and spring emergence stages, henceforth termed 'family lineage survival'. Second, we tested whether the distances travelled by queens between hibernation and nest-searching periods (as a measure of minimum relative queen dispersal distances within our study landscape) were affected by the proportion of high quality habitat surrounding their natal colony. We sampled DNA non-lethally from...

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