Floral Resources Sustaining African Meliponine Bee Species (Hymenoptera: Meliponini) in a Fragile Habitat of Kenya

Abstract

A vast majority of insects visit flowers for food, generally termed as floral rewards. Detailed insights on flowering phenology of plants could give a hint of habitat status and the extent to which such landscapes could support insect pollinators to render both direct and indirect ecosystem services. This study monitored flowering plants which could potentially provide both pollen and nectar sources to four African meliponine bee species (Apidae: Meliponini) naturally occurring in six diverse habitat gradients of the eastern arc mountains (Taita hills) of Kenya. Blooming sequences of identified flowering plants overlapped across seasons with approximately 80 different plant species belonging to 34 families recorded, with the highest proportions from Fabaceae and Asteraceae families dominating flowering plants that were visited (67% of the visits). A flowering calendar is presented to indicate the phenological pattern of all identified floral resources. Hypotrigona gribodoi being the most abundant species had the highest visitation rates on plants belonging to Fabaceae and Asteraceae families, followed by Meliponula ferruginea (black), Plebeina hildebrandti and Hypotrigona ruspolii. This indicates that such fragile habitat could invariably sustain nutritional requirements essential for the survival of insect pollinators such as native meliponine bee species, though bee abundance at flowers did not significantly correlate to food availability (expressed by flowering plant richness).

Effect of climate seasonality and vegetation cover on floral resource selection by two stingless bee species

“…Several studies have also recorded the use of anemophilous plants by stingless bees (Barth 2004;Sierra and Smith 2008;Oliveira 2009;Lopes 2012;Freitas and de Novais 2014;de Novais and Absy 2015;Ferreira and Absy 2017;Absy et al 2018;Radaeski et al 2019;Rezende et al 2019) in other tropical forest ecosystems, such as humid forests in Colombia (Obregon, 2011) and the Atlantic Forest in Brazil (Morgado et al 2011(Morgado et al , 2018Braga et al 2014). In the field, T. angustula was often observed foraging these anemophilous plants and adding their pollen loads to honey pots in the hives, highlighting the variety of plant resources involved in the diet of Meliponini bees (Lorenzon and Matrangolo 2005;Aleixo et al 2016;Vijayakumar and Jeyaraaj 2016;Villanueva-Gutiérrez and Roubik 2016;Bobadoye 2017;Absy et al 2018).…”