Researcher ORCID Identifier

Daniel A. Potter: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1610-2493

Dataset Creation Date

2018

Release Date

8-1-2018

Publisher

University of Kentucky Libraries

Description

Urban and suburban landscapes can be refuges for biodiversity of bees and other pollinators. Public awareness of declining pollinator populations has increased interest in growing plants that provide floral resources for bees. Various publications and websites list “bee-friendly” plants, but such lists are rarely based on empirical data, nor do they emphasize flowering trees and shrubs, which are a major component of urban landscapes. We quantified bee visitation to 72 species of flowering woody landscape plants across 373 urban and suburban sites in Kentucky and southern Ohio, USA, sampling and identifying the bee assemblages associated with 45 of the most bee-attractive species. We found strong plant species effects and variation in seasonal activity of particular bee taxa, but no overall differences in extent of bee visitation or bee genus diversity between native and non–native species, trees and shrubs, or early-, mid-, and late-season blooming plants. Horticulturally-modified varieties of Hydrangea, Prunus, and Rosa with double petals or clusters of showy sterile sepals attracted few bees compared to related plants with more accessible floral rewards. Some of the non-native woody plant species bloomed when floral resources from native plants were scarce and were highly bee-attractive, so their use in landscapes could help extend the flowering season for bees. These data will help city foresters, landscape managers, and the public make informed decisions to create bee–friendly urban and suburban landscapes.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/8czn-nc30

Rights

This dataset is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the dataset creator and source are credited and that changes (if any) are clearly indicated.

File Format

Microsoft Excel comma separated values file (.csv)

File Size

31 KB

Spatial Coverage

Data collected in Lexington, KY and Cincinnati, OH, with many sites on the University of Kentucky (UK) campus.

Language

English

Funding Information

This research was supported by grants from: Bayer North American Bee Care Center (https://beecare.bayer.com/home), BMM, DAP; Horticultural Research Institute (http://www.hriresearch.org/), DAP; United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture Specialty Crop Research Initiative grant 2016-51181-235399 facilitated and administered in collaboration with the Interregional Research Project no. 4 grant 2015-34383-23710 (https://nifa.usda.gov/), DAP; University of Kentucky Nursery Research Endowment Fund (http://www.uky.edu/hort/), BMM, DAP.

Related Content

This is one of two datasets related to:

Mach, B. M., & Potter, D. A. (2018). Quantifying bee assemblages and attractiveness of flowering woody landscape plants for urban pollinator conservation. PLOS ONE, 13(12), e0208428. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0208428

Click here to access this article from UKnowledge.

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Entomology Commons

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