Ten-a-day: bumblebee pollen loads reveal high consistency in foraging breadth among species, sites, and seasons

Pollen and nectar are crucial resources for bees, but vary greatly amongst plant species in their quantity, nutritional quality, and timing of availability. This makes it challenging to identify an appropriate range of plants to meet the nutritional needs of pollinators through the year, though this information is important in the design of pollinator conservation schemes.
Using DNA metabarcoding of pollen loads, we record the floral resource use of UK farmland bumblebees at different stages of their colony lifecycle, and compare this with null models of ‘expected’ resource use based on landscape-scale resource availability (pollen and nectar), to identify foraging priorities and preferences. We use this approach to ask three main questions: i) what is the foraging breadth of individual bumblebees?; ii) do bumblebees utilise a greater or lesser diversity of plant species than expected if they foraged in proportion to resource availability?; iii) which plant species do bumblebees prefere..., The data consists of floral resource phenology values (floral abundance, pollen and nectar) collected on three farms during 2017. In addition, there is pollen DNA metabarcoding data showing the relative read abundances of plant taxa recorded on 187 individual bumblebees. Full details on the collection methodology are provided in the paper., , # Ten-a-day: bumblebee pollen loads reveal high consistency in foraging breadth among species, sites and seasons

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.3ffbg79s7](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.3ffbg79s7)

This dataset provides information on the phenology of floral abundance on three farms in Somerset, UK, as well as DNA metabarcoding data (relative read abundances/ RRA) for all of the plant taxa recorded in bumblebee's pollen loads on these same three farms. We use these datasets in combination to compare the availability of floral resources in the landscape (floral abundance data), with the actual use of these resources by farmland bumblebees (DNA metabarcoding data).

## Description of the data and file structure

**Dataset 1: Floral resource phenology data**

`All_farms_floral_abundance_data.xlsx`

This dataset provides a list of all plant species recorded flowering on the three study farms (ET, B & EM) and their estimated floral abundance on each day of the flowering season, expressed...