Bumblebee flower constancy and pollen diversity over time

Bees often focus their foraging effort on a few or even a single flower species, even if other equally rewarding flower species are present. Although this phenomenon – called flower constancy – has been widely documented during single foraging trips, it is largely unknown if the behavior persists over longer time periods, especially under field conditions with large spatial and temporal variation of resources. We investigated the pollen diet of individuals from nine different Bombus terrestris colonies up to six weeks, placed at either 0, 300 or 1000 m from nearest autumn sown oilseed rape. Adjacency to oilseed rape affected constancy, with a higher flower constancy in colonies far from fields. Overall, 23 % of the pollen foraging trips were flower constant, and the fraction of constant pollen loads did not change over time, although repeatedly sampled individuals that were flower constant once often showed different preferences at other sampling occasions, and the similarity between po..., The data was collected in Southern Sweden during spring/early summer 2017. Commercial bumblebee colonies (Bombus terrestris) were placed in three different areas, and in each of these areas in three different sites that were located next to, 300m from, or 1000m from nearest oilseed rape field. The study design is a subset of the one described in Yourstone et al. 2021, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109249. Individual bumblebee workers were marked and sampled for pollen in their pollen basket (if present). Each row in the dataset \"Pollen_id_Yourstone_et_al_2023.csv\" represents one such sample. At the first sampling occasion, bumblebees returning to the nests were caught and marked by gluing a number plate onto their thorax, and the pollen from their corbicula was collected if present. At subsequent sampling occasions both already marked bumblebees and unmarked individuals were captured, marked if needed, and sampled for pollen if present. The entrance tube was cleaned between samp..., The data file Pollen_id_Yourstone_et_al_2023.csv can be opened with various softwares, including R and Microsoft Excel. 
The code file can be opened as a plain text file, but needs to be opened with the open source software R to be run. ,