Ensuring access to high-quality resources reduces the impacts of heat stress on bees.

ABSTRACT: Pollinators are experiencing declines globally, negatively affecting the reproduction of wild plants and crop production. Well-known drivers of these declines include climatic and nutritional stresses, such as a change of dietary resources due to the degradation of habitat quality. Understanding potential synergies between these two important drivers is needed to improve predictive models of the future effects of climate change on pollinator declines. Here, bumblebee colony bioassays were used to evaluate the interactive effects of heat stress, a reduction of dietary resource quality, and colony size. Using a total of 117 colonies, we applied a fully crossed experiment to test the effect of three dietary quality levels under three levels of heat stress with two colony sizes. Both nutrition

SUBMITTER: Vanderplanck M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6715733 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature