Book Description

Honey bees recruit foragers to rich food sources through the waggle dance. The waggle dance has been used extensively to study the foraging ecology of honey bees in various habitats. We decoded waggle dances and used DNA barcoding of bee-collected pollen to characterize the foraging ecology of honey bees Apis mellifera L.) over 17 months around La Jolla, California, a heavily fragmented environment containing urban, semi-urban, and patches of native scrub habitats. We divided the year into three distinct seasons (dormant, growth, and dry) based on natural patterns of warming and rainfall to understand how honey bee foraging varies over ecologically relevant temporal scales in a fragmented environment. We detected a significant effect of season on foraging distances. We also found that colonies focused their foraging efforts on few patches during the dormant season and performed increasingly wider searches for pollen with changes in season. Lastly, we detected significant seasonal turnover in the proportion of pollen loads with native or non-native pollen. Bees focused their pollen foraging on native species during the dormant season; both native and non-native species during the growth season; and, non-native species during the dry season. Our results show that honey bees are capable of adjusting their foraging behavior with season to exploit common, abundant native and non-native flowers, illustrating the remarkable adaptability of honey bees in fragmented habitats. Furthermore, our study indicates that honey bees may serve as pollinators of common native plants in light of declines in native pollinators bought on by habitat fragmentation.