Thermal biology of bee pollinators from montane Mediterranean habitats

A study was undertaken to assess the diversity in thermal biology of the bee assemblage that pollinates plants in a Mediterranean montane area of southeastern Spain, evaluate its taxonomic and phylogenetic underpinnings, and elucidate whether there existed seasonal, daily, between-habitat or floral visitation correlates of bee thermal biology which could contribute to partition ecological gradients among plant and bee species. Thermal biology parameters were obtained in the laboratory and the field on individual bees of a diverse sample comprising most bee pollinators of the regional plant community. Species-specific thermal biology parameters were combined with quantitative field data on bee pollinators and flower visitation for the regional community of entomophilous plants (Herrera 2023).This data repository consist of 5 data files and 1 code script:<i>bee.ML.supertree.nwk</i><br>Text file with the phylogenetic supertree of world bees in Newick format (Henríquez-Piskulich et al. 2024)<i>raw.K.data.csv</i><br>Delimited text file with thermal constant (<i>K</i>) estimates in the laboratory for <i>N</i> = 645 individual bees. Self-explanatory variable names are in the first row.<i>raw.T.data.csv</i><br>Delimited file with field measurements of thoracic (ti) and air (tair) temperature of <i>N</i> = 1936 individual bees. Self-explanatory variable names are in the first row.<i>species.means.T</i><br>Delimited text file with species means for thoracic temperature (mean.ti), thermal excess (mean.texc) and body mass (mean.peso) for 95 bee species.<i>Pollinator.census.thermal.data.Rda</i><br>Binary file in R format with bee thermal and census data. <i>R.script.for.analyses</i><br>R script for running analysesReferencesHenríquez-Piskulich, P., A. F. Hugall, and D. Stuart-Fox. 2024. A supermatrix phylogeny of the world’s bees (Hymenoptera: Anthophila). Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 190:107963.Herrera, C. M. (2023) Thermal biology of bee pollinators: diversity and community-level correlates. <i>bioRxiv</i> Preprint. doi:10.1101/2023.11.27.568883