Data for: Patch fidelity and patch preference of honey bees and bumble bees
Data files
Jun 06, 2023 version files 156.03 KB
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data.patch.fidelity.csv
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README.md
Abstract
Animals commonly exhibit a tendency to return to previously visited locations. Such tendency is manifested at different scales, for example fidelity to a site, or fidelity to a specific patch within a site. Although patch fidelity has important implications for the pollinators and the plants they visit, our understanding of patch fidelity, and the extent to which it varies among bee species, remains limited. Here, we used a mark-reobservation approach to compare patch fidelity and patch size preference between one bumble bee and one honey bee species foraging on patches of Medicago sativa L. Honey bees exhibited greater patch fidelity (76%) than bumble bees (47%); they were more likely to return to the patch where they were marked. Patch size affected the level of patch fidelity for bumble bees but not for honey bees. Bumble bees were more likely to return to larger relative to smaller patches. In addition to patch fidelity, we detected preference of bees for the larger patches. Bees visited the larger patches more often than the smaller patches. These results add patch fidelity to the already known repertoire of differences in foraging strategies between a bumble bee and a honey bee species. It also indicates how the simultaneous study of distinct species in a similar environment can reveal important previously undetected information about their behavioral ecology. Observed differences in patch fidelity and patch size preferences may have important implications for crop pollination and conservation habitat design.
Methods
We conducted two experiments with a center patch, surrounded by four peripheral patches of two different sizes and distances from the center, to compare patch fidelity and patch size preference between the two bee species. The center and two of the peripheral patches were 9.14 m x 9.14 m and contained 100 plants (small), while the other two peripheral patches were 13.7 m x 13.7 m and contained 225 plants. One of the large and one of the small patches were located 9.14 m diagonally from the center patch, while the other large and small patches were located 18.3 m away. The five patches in the design were referred to, for identification purpose, as the center patch (C), the large near (LN), small near (SN), large far (LF) and small far (SF) patches. Peripheral patches of the same size were located on the same side of the center patch, in this case north.
Individual bumble bees and honey bees foraging in one of the five alfalfa patches were caught and marked with uniquely numbered patch-dependent colored disks. After marking, the bee was released in the patch where it was captured. We then surveyed patches every hour between 9am and 3pm daily, following the first day of marking bees, for a period slightly longer than bee marking (July 29- August 31 in 2020, and July 8-August 2 in 2021). Two observers walked standard paths between adjacent rows of alfalfa plants, each starting at opposite ends of a patch. When a marked bee was spotted foraging on plants to the right or left of an observer, the time of day, patch type, and tag information on the bee were recorded and the present data set was thus generated.
Al data tabulations were performed using dplyr and tidyr packages in the Tidyverse collection of R packages (Wickham et al. 2019) in R version 4.0.3 (R Core Team, 2020); we used chi-square goodness of fit test to determine whether patch fidelity varied among patches; we examined the impact of patch size on patch fidelity using a mixed linear model with patch size as a fixed effect and year as a random variable, with the lme4 package in R (Bates et al. 2015); we used chi-square goodness of fit tests to determine whether the total number of observations were equally distributed among patches, with a null hypothesis of random distribution, i.e. 0.20 per patch; we determined whether the pattern of patch preference differed between bumble bees and honey bees using a chi-square of independence test.