Bees and crops in Spain: an update for melon, watermelon and almond

Abstract

Pollinators of most of the plants cultivated in in the Mediterranean regions of Europe are still unknown. We provide new data and we review previously available information on bees (Apoidea Latreille, 1802) associated with three economically important crops in Spain: melon, watermelon and almond. We found that overall 138 bee species spanning four families visit the studied crop species. The bee assemblages of melon includes 8-35 species, with moderate to high importance of small Lasioglossum Curtis, 1833 (Halictidae Thomson, 1869) and honeybee (Apis mellifera Linnaeus, 1758: Apidae Latreille, 1802). Watermelon flowers are visited by 14-20 species of bees, with low to moderate abundance of honeybees and predominance of small Lasioglossum. Bees collected on almond trees spanned 12-37 species, being the honeybee and medium-size to large Andrena Fabricius, 1775 (Andrenidae Latreille, 1802) and Osmia Panzer, 1806 (Megachilidae Latreille, 1802) predominant. The new samples expanded the geographical distributions of nearly one-fourth of the collected species. Diversity estimators slightly varied even within fields of the same crop, and a cluster analysis suggests both a certain overlap between melon and watermelon and a role of geographical distance on similarity among bee assemblages. Below ground-nesting and solitary species were more frequent than above ground-nesting and eusocial species, but for melon and watermelon the highest abundances were recorded for eusocial

Effects of Managed and Unmanaged Floral Margins on Pollination Services and Production in Melon Crops

“…Regarding the different bee families recorded in the melon fields, the family Halictidae was the most abundant, especially the genus Lasioglossum . This coincides with other works that pointed out this genus as a key pollinator of melon crops [ 39 , 41 , 59 ]. This fact is remarkable, as the pollination deficit is usually solved by farmers through Apis mellifera hives.…”

‘Farming with alternative pollinators’ approach supports diverse and abundant pollinator community in melon fields in a semi-arid landscape

“…Our results confirm that the dominant floral visitors in melon are honeybees, considered the prevailing managed species worldwide for crop pollination (Valido et al ., 2019). Honeybees have already been shown to be the most abundant visitors of melon flowers (Da Silva et al ., 2021), although L. malachurum has been heralded as the key wild floral visitor and highly effective pollinator of melon in Spain (Rodrigo Gómez et al ., 2021). Floral displays of melon have been hypothesized to facilitate pollination by small bees with short tongues like Lasioglossum sp.…”

Eusociality as a neglected aspect of wild bee α‐diversity and its potential impact on diversity estimation

“…After running our simulations, we applied our method to re‐analyse previously published datasets where the abundances of the sampled wild bee species were made available, together with clear separation of the data among localities and years (Buchholz & Egerer, 2020; Buri et al, 2014; Fisogni et al, 2020; Geslin et al, 2016; Hoiss et al, 2012; Kratschmer et al, 2018, 2019; Rodrigo Gómez et al, 2021) (Table S5). We retrieved the abundance data from each study and then N W was calculated from N for each wild bee species.…”

“…Because species with more rarely represented forms of sociality (semi-social and sub-social species) were far less studied in Europe, we did not consider such further levels of sociality in our analysis, which consequently included either solitary or eusocial species. Bee community studies largely focus on females rather than on both sexes, since females are the major providers of pollination services (Roswell et al, 2019), and indeed much more often collected during samplings (Ne'eman et al, 2006;Rodrigo G omez et al, 2021). Hence, our method was set for its application to datasets including the abundances of females.…”

“…It ranges from 0 to 1 and low values indicate the presence of one or a few very abundant species and many other rarer ones. One study on bees (Rodrigo Gómez et al, 2021) also used an index of Taxonomic distinctness ( δ* ) (Clarke & Warwick, 1998), which represents the average distance between any two randomly chosen individuals from different species present in the community. Other metrics use novel and/or available DNA sequence data to obtain a more accurate estimate of phylogenetic diversity among the sampled species (Sandel, 2018).…”