Abstract
AbstractBees play a key role in maintaining healthy terrestrial ecosystems by pollinating plants. Stingless bees (Apidae: Meliponini) are a diverse clade of social bees (>500 species) with a pantropical distribution spanning South and Central America, Africa, India and Austral-Asia. They are garnering increasing attention as commercially-beneficial pollinators of some crops, yet their contribution to the pollination of native plants in the tropics and subtropics remains poorly understood. Here we conduct for the first time a global review of the plants visited by stingless bees. We compile a database of reported associations (flower visits) between stingless bees and plants, from studies that have made either direct observations of foraging bees or analysed the pollen stored in nests. Worldwide, we find stingless bees have been reported to visit the flowers of plants from at least 215 different families and 1434 genera, with frequently reported interactions for many of the tropic’s most species-diverse plant families including Fabaceae, Asteraceae, Rubiaceae, Poaceae, Euphorbiaceae, Myrtaceae, Malvaceae, Arecaceae, Solanaceae, and Anacardiaceae. The stingless bee fauna of each of three major biogeographic regions (Neotropical, Afrotropical and Indo-Malayan-Australasian) were frequent visitors of many of the same plant families, however we detected differences in the proportional use of plant families by the stingless bees of the Indo-Malayan-Australasian and Neotropical regions, likely reflecting differences in the available flora of those regions. Stingless bees in all regions visit a range of exotic species in their preferred plant families (crops, ornamental plants and weeds), in addition to native plants. Although most reports of floral visitation on wild plants do not confirm effective pollen transfer, it is likely that stingless bees make at least some contribution to pollination for the majority of plants they visit. In all, our database supports the view that stingless bees play an important role in the ecosystems of the global tropics and subtropics as pollinators of an exceptionally large and diverse number of plants. This database also highlights important gaps in our knowledge of stingless bee resource use and should benefit future efforts to understand stingless bee-plant interactions.
Publisher
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Reference129 articles.
1. A.B.E.L.H.A. 2017. Sistema de informação sobre interações abelhas-plantas no Brasil. [Online]. Available: http://abelhaseplantas.cria.org.br/ [Accessed 4 Nov 2020].
2. Absy, M. L. , Camargo, J. M. , Kerr, W. E. & Miranda, I. P. D. A. 1984. Espécies de plantas visitadas por Meliponinae (Hymenoptera; Apoidea), para coleta de pólen na região do médio Amazonas. Volume 44, Número 2, Pags. 227–237.
3. Specialization and Rarity Predict Nonrandom Loss of Interactions from Mutualist Networks
4. Pollen collected and foraging activities of Frieseomelitta varia (Lepeletier)(Hymenoptera: Apidae) in an urban landscape;Sociobiology,2013
5. First discovery of a rare polygyne colony in the stingless bee Melipona quadrifasciata (Apidae, Meliponini);Apidologie,2011
Cited by
12 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献