One for the road: Bumble bees consume pollen at flowers
Maggie M. Mayberry,
Jacob S. Francis,
Jenny K. Burrow
et al.
Abstract:Bees are the primary consumers of pollen in many ecosystems, but pollen consumption by adult bees is rarely studied, leaving a gap in our understanding of the nutritional ecology of collective foraging and pollination biology more generally. For example, while eusocial bees feed upon pollen from colony stores, whether they also consume pollen directly from flowers to meet their own needs or to assess its quality for the broader collective is unknown. We therefore captured wild bumble bee colonies (B. bimaculat… Show more
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