Pollen collection by the western honey bee and common eastern bumble bee foraging in a common landscape and applications for agri-environment schemes

Agricultural landscapes often provide an impoverished environment for bees given their limited plant and pollen diversity. Agri-environment schemes (AES) such as flower strips have been developed to improve the quality of the agricultural environment for bees but their  efficacy  varies with their composition and, for specific pollinators, with the value of the available plant species. This study provides a detailed report of the pollen collection patterns of two bee species, the western honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) and the common eastern bumble bee (Bombus impatiens Cresson), over their foraging season. We compared the floral constancy, pollen richness and diversity of the two bee species and the pollen morphotypes of bee-collected pollen   in relation to resource availability. The honey bee was more flower constant while the bumble bee collected a greater family level diversity of pollen. While both bee species collected similar resources over their entire foraging season, the preferred morphotypes in given surveys differed between bee species. Neither bee species collected resources based on their availability but indicated patterns of preference and avoidance. We discuss how such knowledge can inform on the composition of AES to best sustain these pollinators in more impoverished depauperate agricultural landscapes.

Methods
This dataset was collected as part of a field experiment in 2016. Corbicular pollen loads of honey bees and bumble bees were collected, along with floral resource availabilty from June through September. The contents of pollen loads were idenfied using visual microscopy to determine the frequency of flower constancy, along with the richness and diversity of pollen collected by bee colonies. In addition, the abundance distribution of flower resources was compared to that of bee collected pollen to examine more preferred and less preferred pollen types for these two bee species throughout the foraging season. Floral abundance was sampled seperately for wildflowers, alfalfa, corn, and soybean, so there will be a seperate dataset for each. 

Data was processed using R, and an annotated RMD script can be found here https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14738621