Foraging strategies are maintained despite workforce reduction: A multidisciplinary survey on the pollen collected by a social pollinator

The way pollinators gather resources may play a key role for buffering their population declines. Social pollinators like bumblebees could adjust their foraging after significant workforce reductions to keep provisions to the colony optimal, especially in terms of pollen diversity and quantity. To t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2019-11, Vol.14 (11), p.e0224037-e0224037
Main Authors: Biella, Paolo, Tommasi, Nicola, Akter, Asma, Guzzetti, Lorenzo, Klecka, Jan, Sandionigi, Anna, Labra, Massimo, Galimberti, Andrea
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal Nutritional Physiological Phenomena
Animals
Bees
Bees - physiology
Biodiversity
Biology and Life Sciences
Biotechnology
Bombus
Bumblebees
Cameras
Climate change
Colonies
Competition
Czech Republic
Deoxyribonucleic acid
DNA
DNA barcoding
DNA Barcoding, Taxonomic
Domestication
Ecology
Ecology and Environmental Sciences
Entomology
Feeding Behavior
Filtration
Foraging behavior
Influence
Methods
Pellets
Plant diversity
Plant phenology
Plants - classification
Plants - genetics
Pollen
Pollen - genetics
Pollination - physiology
Pollinators
Population decline
Population Dynamics
Social Sciences
Statistical methods
Video cameras
Workers
Zoology
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Summary:The way pollinators gather resources may play a key role for buffering their population declines. Social pollinators like bumblebees could adjust their foraging after significant workforce reductions to keep provisions to the colony optimal, especially in terms of pollen diversity and quantity. To test what effects a workforce reduction causes on the foraging for pollen, commercially-acquired colonies of the bumblebee Bombus terrestris were allowed to forage in the field and they were experimentally manipulated by removing half the number of workers. For each bumblebee, the pollen pellets were taxonomically identified with DNA metabarcoding of the ITS2 region followed by a statistical filtering based on ROC curves to filter out underrepresented OTUs. Video cameras and network analyses were employed to investigate changes in foraging strategies and behaviour. After filtering out the false-positives, HTS metabarcoding yielded a high plant diversity in the pollen pellets; for plant identity and pollen quantity traits no differences emerged between samples from treated and from control colonies, suggesting that plant choice was influenced mainly by external factors such as the plant phenology. The colonies responded to the removal of 50% of their workers by increasing the foraging activity of the remaining workers, while only negligible changes were found in diet breadth and indices describing the structure of the pollen transport network. Therefore, a consistency in the bumblebees' feeding strategies emerges in the short term despite the lowered workforce.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0224037