When you’re deciding what to have for dinner, chances are you don’t just want a meal that tastes good, you want something quick and easy to make. As it turns out, bees are also looking for the most efficient meal. Bees are foragers, visiting flowers to collect nectar and pollinating along the way. This is part of their niche, the way they rely on and impact their environment. But if different species in the same area have similar niches, they risk competing.
A study from the University of Sussex compared the foraging habits of bumblebees and honeybees, two species of different sizes that often live in the same places and rely on the same diets. Curious how the two species were able to co-exist so well, researchers characterized the physical differences between the bees, and observed visits to twenty-two species of flowering plants.
The researchers found that the fuzzy foragers had differentiated their niches, each visiting the flowers they could collect nectar from more efficiently. Niche differentiation is a big part of maintaining biodiversity: how many niches are available affects how many species can live in an ecosystem. Having lots of different flowers helps bees to coexist. In turn, bee pollination allows plants to reproduce.
And people have a part to play in maintaining biodiversity too. So the next time you’re visiting a local park or deciding what to grow in your garden, take a second to think about what you can do to help maintain a wide variety of native wildflowers. Because if we take care of the bees, then they’ll take care of us!
A special thanks goes to for Kathy Darragh, Indiana University for reviewing today's episode. This episode was written by Riley Rees as a part of Heather Reynolds’ class Z620 Ecological Niche Service-learning.
Further Reading
Balfour, N. J., K. Shackleton, N. A. Arscott, K. Roll‐Baldwin, A. Bracuti, G. Toselli, and F. L. W. Ratnieks. 2021. Energetic efficiency of foraging mediates bee niche partitioning. Ecology 102: e03285.