Abstract
When alien pollinator species enter a native community of pollinators in which resource partitioning has been established, the pollination network between plants and pollinators may be modified through the interactions between the pollinators over the use of floral resources. We observed the floral-use patterns of native (Bombus hypocrita and B. deuteronymus) and alien (B. terrestris) bumblebee species in a coastal grassland in northern Japan. We analyzed the factors determining resource partitioning patterns. B. hypocrita tended to visit flowers with shallow or wide open corollas, such as Rosa rugosa, whereas B. deuteronymus visited flowers with complex or deeper corollas, such as Lathyrus japonicus. Given the wider floral preference of B. terrestris, floral use by the alien bumblebees consistently overlapped with that of native bumblebees. The visitation of B. terrestris to R. rugosa flowers was positively correlated with that of B. hypocrita. These bumblebee species frequently used similar floral resources, in part because of the large overlap in the seasonality of their foraging activity. The visitation frequency of B. deuteronymus to L. japonicus flowers was independent of the visitation frequency of other bumblebee species. The major visitation periods of the bumblebees to L. japonicus flowers reciprocally differed between B. deuteronymus and B. terrestris, suggesting phenological resource partitioning between these species. Our study suggests that phenological niche partitioning is more common in specialized flowers (L. japonicus) than in generalized flowers (R. rugosa).
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Acknowledgments
We thank M. Sumita for assistance during field observations, K. Hamahara for helpful suggestions during statistical analysis, and Dr G. Kudo for valuable comments and extensive revisions of the manuscript. We also thank Dr K. Yabe for critically reviewing and helping to improve the quality of the manuscript.
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Appendices
Appendix 1
See Fig. 4.
Flowering patterns of major species visited by bumblebees (>90 total visits; see Table 2) over 4 years (2009–2012) at Muen and Benten. The abundance of flowers is expressed as the relative number of open flowers in which the maximum flower number is set as 100 %
Appendix 2
See Table 8.
Appendix 3
See Table 9.
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Nishikawa, Y., Shimamura, T. Effects of alien invasion by Bombus terrestris L. (Apidae) on the visitation patterns of native bumblebees in coastal plants in northern Japan. J Insect Conserv 20, 71–84 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-015-9841-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-015-9841-y