Nutrition as a critical link between biodiversity and bee health

Picture: The photo shows a scientist in the laboratory holding an insect with tweezers over the opening of a plastic tube. The scientist is wearing blue latex gloves. Laboratory materials can be seen in the background.

Goals

The aim is to understand how land-use-induced changes in the diversity and composition of flowering plants affect the interactions between plants and bees. Data will be collected on the following parameters:

Diversity and abundance of wild bee species throughout the year
Nutritional and health status of collected bee species in relation to the LUI
Bee-flower interaction networks
Chemical composition of pollen of bee-visited bee plant species

More information about this project can be found here: https://nutrib2.project.uj.edu.pl/

Picture: The photo shows a clipboard lying on the grass of an unmown meadow in the sunshine. Documents are attached to the clipboard. A pen and a sealed centrifuge tube are on the form above. In the background of the picture, a fenced climate measuring station, individual tall shrubs and, on the horizon, meadows and forests can be seen under a blue sky with clouds.

Climate station

Picture: The photo shows the good-humoured scientists of the project team jumping around in a meadow with insect catching quivers in their hands.

NutriB2 Field Team

Publications

Land-use intensity effects on intraspecific variation of pollination-associated floral traits in four typical grassland species

Auswirkungen der Landnutzungsintensität auf die intraspezifische Variation von bestäubungsassoziierten Blütenmerkmalen bei vier typischen Grünlandarten

Höwener A. S. (2022): Land-use intensity effects on intraspecific variation of pollination-associated floral traits in four typical grassland species. Master thesis, TU München

Critical links between biodiversity and health in wild bee conservation.

Parreño M.A., Alaux C., Brunet J.-L., Buydens L., Filipiak M., Henry M., Keller A., Klein A.-M., Kuhlmann M., Leroy C., Meeus I., Palmer-Young E., Piot N., Requier F., Ruedenauer F., Smagghe G., Stevenson P. C., Leonhardt S. D. (2022): Critical links between biodiversity and health in wild bee conservation. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 37 (4), 309-321. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2021.11.013.

Cooperations are projects financed by the cooperation partners’ own funds and thus financially independent of the DFG-funded infrastructure priority program ‟Biodiversity Exploratories (BE)”. They complement the BE with further interesting research content on biodiversity research and in return benefit from the infrastructure of the Biodiversity Exploratories.