Foraging and Drifting Patterns of a Highly Eusocial Neotropical Stingless Bee Species Assessed by Radio-frequency Identification Tags

Abstract

Bees play a key role in ecosystem services as the main pollinators of numerous flowering plants. Studying factors influencing their foraging behaviour is relevant not only to understand their biology, but also how populations might respond to changes in their habitat and to the climate. Here, we used radio-frequency identification tags to monitor the foraging behaviour of the neotropical stingless bee Melipona fasciculata with special interest in drifting patterns, i.e. when a forager drifts into a foreign nest. In addition, we collected meteorological data to study how abiotic factors affect bees’ lifespan and behaviour. Our results show that only 35 % of bees never drifted to another hive nearby, and that factors such as temperature, humidity and solar irradiation affected the foragers drifting rates and/or lifespan. Moreover, we tested whether drifting levels would decrease after marking the nest entrances with different patterns. Contrary to our predictions, there was an increase in the proportion of drifting, indicating that this could be a deliberate strategy rather than an orientation mistake. Overall, our results demonstrate how managed bee populations are affected by both nearby hives and climate factors, offering unprecedented insights on their biology and potential commercial application as crop pollinators.

Foraging and Drifting Patterns of the Highly Eusocial Neotropical Stingless Bee Melipona fasciculata Assessed by Radio-Frequency Identification Tags

“…When appropriate, models were tested for temporal autocorrelation, which was not observed in the data. The R script used in the analyses as well as the original datasets are publicly available in the data repository (Oliveira et al, 2021). All models presented in the results section are Poisson GLMs unless otherwise specified.…”

Decoding Colony Size of Amazonian Stingless Bees Through Intrinsic Parameters

“…These colonies were left undisturbed and without supplemental feeding during the three months prior to the experiment and were kept in individual wooden shelters (Contrera and Venturieri 2008), distanced at least 2 meters from each other. To reduce the possibility of drifting (i.e., foragers returning to wrong colonies; see Oliveira et al 2021), the entrances of neighboring colonies were arranged in opposing directions.…”