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Sandpits provide critical refuge for bees and wasps (Hymenoptera: Apocrita)

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Abstract

Evidence-based conservation allows the evaluation of both the collateral benefits and the drawbacks of a wide range of human activities, like quarrying. In this study, the community structure of bees and wasps (Hymenoptera:Apocrita) in Central European sandpits was investigated, focusing on the changes caused by quarrying cessation and technical reclamation, as well as on the changes caused by spontaneous succession leading to the increased availability of food resources but also to the loss of the number and size of available bare sand patches. The bees and wasps demonstrated an exceptional ability to colonize the newly emerging sand quarrying areas, and to survive in them unless these were quarried as intensively as to not allow the development of any early successional vegetation. Both active and closed sandpits were found to serve as important regional refuges for the persistence of many rare species. In total, 221 species were detected, 53 of those were red-listed, with two species thought to be regionally extinct. Typically, active quarrying was associated with the presence of Bembecinus tridens, Halictus subauratus, H. maculatus, and Andrena nigroaenea. The list of the species of conservation interest is provided, and so is the detailed analysis of the life-history traits of the species in relation to the presence of bare sand patches, vegetation cover, quarrying intensity, and time elapsed since the formation of each artificial habitat patch. Sandpits as refuges for xerothermophilous and psammophilous hymenopterans are usually completely and irreversibly lost if the current legislature enforcing the technical reclamation over spontaneous or assisted succession is applied in all or most of the post-mining areas.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Jakub Straka for the revision of determination of selected species, Pavel Tyrner for sharing the literature, and Danuše Vymetálková for language editing. This study was supported in part by the Ministry of the Environment of the Czech Republic, and by the Charles University in Prague project PRVOUK P31/2012. We are grateful to the two reviewers of the first version of the manuscript for their valuable comments.

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  1. Third Faculty of Medicine, Charles University in Prague, Ruská 87, 100 00, Prague 10, Czech Republic

    Petr Heneberg

  2. Faculty of Science, University of Hradec Králové, Rokitanského 62, 500 03, Hradec Králové, Czech Republic

    Petr Bogusch

  3. Calla—Association for Environmental Conservation, České Budějovice, Fráni Šrámka 35, 370 04, České Budějovice 3, Czech Republic

    Jiří Řehounek

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  1. Petr Heneberg
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Heneberg, P., Bogusch, P. & Řehounek, J. Sandpits provide critical refuge for bees and wasps (Hymenoptera: Apocrita). J Insect Conserv 17, 473–490 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-012-9529-5

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