Honey bees (Apis mellifera) modify plant-pollinator network structure, but do not alter wild species’ interactions

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are widely used for honey production and crop pollination, raising concern for wild pollinators, as honey bees may compete with wild pollinators for floral resources. The first sign of competition, before changes appear in wild pollinator abundance or diversity, may be changes to wild pollinator interactions with plants. Such changes for a community can be measured by looking at changes to metrics of resource use overlap in plant-pollinator interaction networks. Studies of honey bee effects on plant-pollinator networks have usually not distinguished whether honey bees alter wild pollinator interactions, or if they merely alter total network structure by adding their own interactions. To test this question, we experimentally introduced honey bees to a Canadian grassland and measured plant-pollinator interactions at varying distances from the introduced hives. We found that honey bees increased the network ..., In southern Alberta, Canada we established eighteen 30 x 2 m transects at 100 m, 500 m, and 5000 m distances on either side of each of 3 clusters of honey bee hives for a total of six replicates. Between May 28 and August 28, 2019, observers visited each transect and surveyed insect flower visitation almost once per week for a total of 10 collection rounds. All insects that visibly contacted the anthers or stigma of open flowers were collected with a hand net and placed in labelled individual vials, frozen, and identified to species in the lab. Associated flowers were identified to species. The data were entered in Excel and processed and cleaned in R/Rstudio.
The data provided includes interaction data from nineteen transects (originally 18 but F5000 was replaced with G5000 mid-season). Interactions are recorded between pollinators and plants and the dataset also includes flower species abundance data for each transect sampled. Additionally, transect locations and locations of the bee ..., Microsoft Excel is needed to open the data files and R is needed to analyze the data., # Honey bees (Apis mellifera) modify plant-pollinator network structure, but do not alter wild species interactions

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## Abstract

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are widely used for honey production and crop pollination, raising concern for wild pollinators, as honey bees may compete with wild pollinators for floral resources. The first sign of competition, before changes appear in wild pollinator abundance or diversity, may be changes to wild pollinator interactions with plants. Such changes for a community can be measured by looking at changes to metrics of resource use overlap in plant-pollinator interaction networks. Studies of honey bee effects on plant-pollinator networks have usually not distinguished whether honey bees alter wild pollinator interactions, or if they merely alter total network structure by adding their own interactions. To test this question, we experimentally introduced honey bees to a Canadian grassland and measured plant-pollinator interactions at varying dist...,