Introduced bees (Osmia cornifrons) collect pollen from both coevolved and novel host-plant species within their family-level phylogenetic preferences

Abstract

Studying the pollen preferences of introduced bees allows us to investigate how species use host-plants when establishing in new environments. Osmia cornifrons is a solitary bee introduced into North America from East Asia for pollination of Rosaceae crops such as apples and cherries. We investigated whether O. cornifrons (i) more frequently collected pollen from host-plant species they coevolved with from their geographic origin, or (ii) prefer host-plant species of specific plant taxa independent of origin. To address this question, using pollen metabarcoding, we examined the identity and relative abundance of pollen in larval provisions from nests located in different landscapes with varying abundance of East-Asian and non-Asian plant species. Our results show that O. cornifrons collected more pollen from plant species from their native range. Plants in the family Rosaceae were their most preferred pollen hosts, but they differentially collected species native to East Asia, Europe, or North America depending on the landscape. Our results suggest that while O. cornifrons frequently collect pollen of East-Asian origin, the collection of pollen from novel species within their phylogenetic familial affinities is common and can facilitate pollinator establishment. This phylogenetic preference highlights the effectiveness of O. cornifrons as crop pollinators of a variety of Rosaceae crops from different geographic origins. Our results imply that globalization of non-native plant species may ease the naturalization of their coevolved pollinators outside of their native range.

Harnessing the power of metabarcoding in the ecological interpretation of plant-pollinator DNA data: strategies and consequences of reads filtering

“…From the 42 reviewed studies, seven non filtered publicly available dataset were retrieved along with one unpublished dataset, produced by the authors, that was also included in the subsequent analysis (available upon request at http://doi/10.6084/m9.figshare.13637576, this data will be published after paper acceptance, ndr). Among these, four datasets were obtained by processing pollen found in nests or carried on insects bodies (Bell et al, 2017; Biella et al, 2019; Vaudo et al, 2020; along with the unpublished one, hereafter Tommasi et al, unpublished, that contains information about interactions between 249 insects and 156 plants). Three dataset comes from honey sample analysis (Lucek et al 2019; DeVere et al, 2017; Jones et al, 2021), and one was obtained from the analysis of pollen mock samples specially constructed for methodological assessments (Bell et al, 2019).…”

Using DNA Metabarcoding to Identify Floral Visitation by Pollinators

“…Alternatively, pollen may be identified by DNA metabarcoding: a process involving identifying all species in an environmental sample using DNA barcode markers and highthroughput sequencing [25][26][27]. DNA metabarcoding has been used to successfully identify pollen from provisions within nests [28][29][30], honey [31][32][33], proboscises [34,35], guts [36,37], and the legs or bodies of insects [38][39][40] (Supporting Information). Whilst the majority of DNA metabarcoding studies utilize pollen, some have identified raw plant material from within nests to identify the leaf preferences of solitary bees [41][42][43].…”

Pollen DNA metabarcoding and related methods in global change ecology: prospects, challenges, and progress

“…In the US, there has been considerable reforestation and urbanisation (He et al, 2019;Song et al, 2018), at the expense of grassland and herbaceous areas (Lark, Meghan Salmon, & Gibbs, 2015;Otto, Roth, Carlson, & Smart, 2016). Pollen DNA metabarcoding has been used to understand the flexibility of pollinator species dietary niche in response to such changing environmental conditions (Vaudo et al, 2020) and to evaluate and improve conservation efforts (Gresty et al, 2018;Piko et al, 2021). Land-use change can also alter the diversity of resources available to pollinators, with decreased floral richness in agricultural monocultures and context-specific increases or decreases with urbanisation (da Rocha-Filho et al, 2021;Jones, Brennan, et al, 2021;Lucek et al, 2019;Richardson et al, 2021;Samuelson, Gill, & Leadbeater, 2020).…”