Can Native Plants Mitigate Climate-related Forage Dearth for Honey Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae)?

ABSTRACT: Extreme weather events, like high temperatures and droughts, are predicted to become common with climate change, and may negatively impact plant growth. How honey bees (Apis mellifera L. [Hymenoptera: Apidae]) will respond to this challenge is unclear, especially when collecting pollen, their primary source of protein, lipids, and micro-nutrients. We explored this response with a data set from multiple research projects that measured pollen collected by honey bees during 2015-2017 in which above-average temperatures and a drought occurred in 2017. We summarized the abundance and diversity of pollen collected from July to September in replicated apiaries kept at commercial soybean and corn farms in Iowa, in the Midwestern USA. The most commonly collected pollen was from clover (Trifolium sp

SUBMITTER: Zhang G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8827321 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature