Metabarcoding of honey to assess differences in plant-pollinator interactions between urban and non-urban sites

Ever-faster rates of urbanization have led to the substantial loss of agricultural and natural land. Plant-pollinator interactions in urban environments are likely to differ from non-urban ones because of changes in the vegetation. However, quantifying plant-pollinator interactions is often labor-intensive and remains challenging. Here, we compared the plant species that are visited by honeybees from urban and non-urban sites by metabarcoding of pollen in honey. We successfully identified a total of 262 plant genera, 15 of which were visited predominantly. We further observed substantial variation among samples in terms of plant composition, the number of crop plant genera and the number of nonnative plant genera. While land cover differed significantly between urban and non-urban sites, we found that plant diversity represented in the honey did not statistically co-vary.