Wild bumble bee colony abundance, scaled by field size, predicts pollination services

Although bee visitation rate to flowers is often used to assess both pollination services and bee abundance, the abundance of social species needs to be assessed by quantifying the number of colonies instead of the number of foraging individuals. Because accurately quantifying the number of wild bee colonies can be difficult, the relationship of visitation rates provided by foragers and the abundance of colonies contributing those foragers from the surrounding landscape is poorly documented for social species. Here, we use genetic methods and statistical inference to estimate the abundance of wild colonies of Bombus impatiens in the surrounding landscape providing foragers to 30 commercial pumpkin (Cucurbita pepo) fields over 4 years across a 13,000 km2 area in Pennsylvania (U.S.A.). We show that the abundance of wild colonies in the surrounding landscape providing foragers per field (colony abundance per field) ranges from 291 to 829 colonies per field. Furthermore, colony abundance ...尽管学界常通过蜂类访花频率来同步评估授粉服务与蜂类丰度，但社会性蜂类的种群丰度需通过量化蜂群总数而非觅食个体数来估算。由于精准量化野生蜂群的数量颇具难度，目前针对社会性蜂类，其觅食个体的访花频率与周边景观中贡献这些觅食蜂的蜂群丰度之间的关联仍记载不足。本研究借助遗传学方法与统计推断，对美国宾夕法尼亚州13000平方公里范围内、历时4年的30个商业南瓜（Cucurbita pepo）田块展开研究，估算了为这些田块提供觅食蜂的野生印地安那熊蜂（Bombus impatiens）的蜂群丰度。研究结果显示，为各田块提供觅食蜂的周边景观野生蜂群丰度（即单田块蜂群丰度）区间为每田块291至829个蜂群。此外，蜂群丰度……