Impact of land use patterns on bee communities in the north of Côte d'Ivoire (West Africa)

Abstract

Natural and protected area degradation constitutes a threat to bee communities and could decrease crop yield by reducing bee pollination effectiveness. For West Africa, changes in bee communities across disturbance gradients from savannah to agricultural land are mainly unknown. Our study aimed to assess the impact of land use patterns on bee communities in the department of Korhogo. We chose three sites of varying disturbance intensity (low, medium and high disturbance). Bees were caught using pan traps. Abundance, richness, evenness and community structure of bees were assessed. During 6 months of sampling, 3176 bee specimens belonging to three families (Apidae, Halictidae and Megachilidae) were caught, comprising 18 species and 15 genera. Species richness of Halictidae and abundance of Apidae were highest (F = 93.86; p = 0.0051). The station with low disturbance was more diversified (H′ = 2.75). Bee average abundance was higher in sites with medium disturbance. Our findings are relevant to biodiversity conservation. They show that bee diversity is high where the disturbance level is still low.

Can habitat characteristics of a West African forest‐savanna mosaic landscape model bee community composition?

“…This high representativeness might be attributed to the dominance of species belonging to this family in open and/ or secondary vegetation (Bárbola & Laroca, 1993). Our results are consistent with those of Eardley et al (2010) and Coulibaly et al (2023) in West Africa, who showed that the Halictidae family is the most diversified in sub-Saharan Africa. However, the used methodological approach and material with yellow pan traps might also maximised the sampling of species belonging to family Halictidae in comparison to Apidae and Megachilidae (Cane et al, 2000).…”