Similarities and differences in the realized niche of two allopatric populations of a solitary bee under environmental variability

Abstract

We studied the realized niche of two distant allopatric wool-carder bee populations (bee-plant interaction and reproductive biology in weather variability). In one population, we analyzed the direct and indirect effects of weather on bee-resource interactions. The two populations shared several niche characteristics but showed some differences. Anthidium vigintipunctatum is a specialist species, with plasticity to extend the individual niche pushed by resources availability and weather variability. In both regions, the bee's response to weather condition was similar (nesting rates and the reproductive success). Causal analysis indicated climate directly determines bee's reproductive success, and indirect resource availability effects are subtle. The immediate response to environmental conditions warms about A. vigintipunctatum sensitivity to expected changes in the regional climate which could be a negative pressure on bees' survival.

Wild bees as winners and losers: Relative impacts of landscape composition, quality, and climate

“…Additionally, precipitation influences spring plant‐community composition and floral‐resource availability. Finally, increased precipitation could reduce nesting success, as found in recent study on Anthidium vigintipunctatum , a cavity‐nesting species (Megachilidae; Vitale et al, 2020). In all of these scenarios, reproductive output would be reduced, resulting in lower abundance the following year.…”

Seasonal bee communities vary in their responses to resources at local and landscape scales: implication for land managers

“…We attribute the higher richness of early bees in 2019 to a better match between our sampling time and flight period of most early bees (Kammerer 2021). The differences in the summer collections was likely also due to weather conditions in the previous year, as the summer of 2018 was extremely rainy, with near-record high precipitation (DiLiberto 2018), which may have reduced foraging opportunities and negatively affected bee populations (Tuell and Isaacs 2010;Vitale et al 2020). Evaluating the effect of weather conditions on bee communities requires multiple years of sampling, and thus we did not formally include these variables in this study, but such analyses have been conducted in other studies (Kammerer 2021;Filazzola et al 2021).…”

Phenological mismatches and the demography of solitary bees

“…(mostly the dominant Larrea divaricata and possibly its less abundant congeners L. cuneifolia and L. nitida ) as sources of pollen for brood cell provision and petal sources as brood cell building material [28]. Anthidium vigintipunctatum , although less specialized on its flower resources than T. laticeps and M. leucographa , relies heavily on pollen of the tree Prosopis flexuosa [47,48]. Thus, it seems unsurprising that phenological mismatches between the nesting of these species and the flowering of their floral resources leads to detectable effects on their demography.…”

“…Our findings help elucidate the role of phenological mismatches for the demography of wild pollinators, which perform key ecosystem functions and provide important services for humanity [24,25]. Given the prospect of increased climatic variability expected in many of the world's regions [49], and the influence of climate on phenology and phenological mismatch [3–5,14,21,48], our results have important implications for our understanding of the potential ecological consequences of climate change.…”