Native bee populations can bounce back after the bees move

Managed bees can affect native bee populations when introduced into new areas, but a study led by researchers in Pennsylvania shows that under certain conditions, if the appeary leaves, the native bee will be It is suggested that it can bounce back.

This study, published in the Journal of Insect Science, examined the effects of migratory bird bee-keeping (the practice of honeybee colonies moving to some other locations in the year) on native bee populations .

Researchers found that when managed bees move into an area, native honeybee populations decrease in abundance and diversity. However, where appiraries were stored for years and then removed, native bee populations increased again in both total numbers and species diversity.

Margarita Lopez Uribe, an early career professor of entomology at Lorenzo L. Langstros University of Agricultural Sciences, and the findings suggest that migratory birds may be an obstacle to native bees, but Those groups said that they might be possible to recover.

“These sites suggest that the population has temporarily declined due to the evacuation of native honeybees as they only recovered a year after the removal of Appiari. The bees could rebound because the landscape is rich in flowers and minimal agriculture and pesticide use.”

However, she added that in areas with low bee flower diversity and space, the results may differ if the density of managed bee colonies is high.

Researchers say insect populations are declining worldwide, which can be attributed to many human activities, including changes in insect habitat and the introduction of non-native species. These exotic species can have a positive effect on crop plants, but they can also compete with native species for their resources, such as honeybees that compete with native honeybees for their flowers.

Bees are so widespread, researchers said it would be difficult to design a study examining this competition between bees and other bee species. For this study, they moved to the Qinghai Tibet Plateau in China. This is an area where bees do not live in the wild and exist only for managed divisions of migratory birds, each containing about 60-100 colonies.

“The bees are stored primarily in the lowlands of Sichuan, but they get too hot in the summer,” said Lopez Uribe. “So for the past 40 years, beekeepers have been transporting the colonies to higher elevations, which are significantly cooler and have plenty of flower resources. Pesticide exposure is also low.

Originally, researchers planned to analyze bee populations at two types of sites. One is the one that the bees were currently held and what they didn’t. An unexpected third type was added when a music festival took place in one of the regions that previously housed migratory bird appearies. This allowed the team to study areas where bees had previously been stored for decades before being removed the previous year.

The researchers selected two spots for each type of site to collect samples, and collected bees in each plot over the three days. The bees were then classified and identified as either honey bees or natural bee species.

After analyzing the data, they found that the figures for native bees were lowest for sites that currently contain bees and higher for sites that previously or did not have bees.

These reductions have particularly affected the dominant native bee species in the region: Andrena sp. 3. Mining Bee. Native native numbers have recovered at sites where bee colonies were removed the previous year, but Andrena sp. Abundance of. 3 remained low.

The researchers also found that phylogenetic diversity in the Native Bee, a measure of the amount of evolutionary history between species groups, is now in areas that contain bees and are even higher in previously included areas. I found it higher. This increase in phylogenetic diversity is the Andrena sp. This may be because there are fewer numbers. Three other species have access to limited foraging or nesting sites.

The study was set up in China, but Lopez Uribe said the findings are likely to apply to many other areas around the world.

“In our study, we were talking about moving up to 100 colonies per apiary, which is very much compared to, for example, a total of 1.5 million colonies that track to California every year. It’s not that much,” she said. “However, in areas where a small number of colonies are being moved, the results may be similar.”

Overall, researchers are likely to find that while the introduction of controlled honeybees reduces the abundance of native honeybees, the long-term effects will depend on the number of colonies introduced in the honeybee and the duration of their existence. He said it suggests that. Future studies can examine the impact of these bees’ density and duration on the abundance, community composition, and pollination services of native bees across multiple seasons.

Anthony Vaudo, US Forest Service. Michael Oh, Stattorich Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart; Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qing-Song Zhou; Chao Dongzu; Chinese Academy of Sciences. Junpeng Mu of Mianyang Normal University also co-authored the study.