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Visual ecology of Indian carpenter bees I: Light intensities and flight activity

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Abstract

Bees are mostly active during the daytime, but nocturnality has been reported in some bee families. We studied temporal flight activity in three species of carpenter bees (genus Xylocopa) in relation to light intensities. X. leucothorax is diurnal, X. tenuiscapa is largely diurnal being only occasionally crepuscular, while X. tranquebarica is truly nocturnal. Occasional forays into dim light by X. tenuiscapa are likely to be due to the availability of richly rewarding Heterophragma quadriloculare (Bignoniaceae) flowers, which open at night. X. tranquebarica can fly even during the moonless parts of nights when light intensities were lower than 10−5 cd m−2, which makes this species the only truly nocturnal bee known so far. Other known dim-light species fly during crepuscular or moonlit periods. We compare eye and body sizes with other known diurnal and dim-light bees. We conclude that while extremely large ocellar diameters, large eye size:body size ratio, large number of ommatidia and large ommatidial diameters are all adaptations to dim-light foraging, these alone do not sufficiently explain the flights of X. tranquebarica in extremely dim light. We hypothesise that additional adaptations must confer extreme nocturnality in X. tranquebarica.

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Acknowledgments

We are thankful to two anonymous reviewers for comments on this manuscript. We thank our field assistants Kalu Kurade, Ganpat Lohakare, Subhash Vangere and Narayan Chikhale for help with fieldwork and their hospitality in Bhimashankar. We thank the Forest Department of Maharashtra State for research permits. We are thankful to Carina Rasmussen for help with facet counts. We specially thank Charles D. Michener for species determination. We are grateful to the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Stockholm, the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) and the Swedish Research Council for financial support. We declare that the experiments comply with the “Principles of animal care” and also with the current laws of the country in which the experiments were performed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cell and Organism Biology–Zoology, Lund University, Helgonavägen 3, 22362, Lund, Sweden

    Hema Somanathan, Eric J. Warrant & Almut Kelber

  2. Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, 560 012, India

    Hema Somanathan & Renee M. Borges

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  1. Hema Somanathan
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  2. Renee M. Borges
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  3. Eric J. Warrant
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  4. Almut Kelber
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Correspondence to Hema Somanathan.

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Somanathan, H., Borges, R.M., Warrant, E.J. et al. Visual ecology of Indian carpenter bees I: Light intensities and flight activity. J Comp Physiol A 194, 97–107 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-007-0291-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-007-0291-1

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