Fruit orchards and woody semi-natural habitat provide complementary resources for pollinators in agricultural landscapes

To safeguard insect pollinators and their pollination services, we need to understand how landscape structure regulates the distribution of resources that sustain pollinator populations. However, evidence of how pollinator communities benefit from the variety of resources distributed across different habitat types is scarce. To explore complementary resource provision, we conducted a field study to examine the resources available to pollinators in fruit orchards and woody semi-natural habitat. We studied 13 landscapes containing both habitat types in Flanders, Belgium. In every habitat element, we surveyed nesting resources, floral resources and wild pollinators (i.e. wild bees and hover flies) during three consecutive time periods in the season (once before- and twice after mass-flowering of the fruit orchards). We concluded that the composition of nesting resources for wild bees was clearly different between both habitat types. Woody semi-natural habitat also provided more diverse- an...