Abstract
Urban ecosystems can support diverse communities of wild native bees. Because bloom times are conserved by geographic origin, incorporating some non-invasive non-native plants in urban landscapes can extend the flowering season and help support bees and other pollinators during periods when floral resources from native plants are limiting. A caveat, though, is the possibility that non-native plants might disproportionately host non-native, potentially invasive bee species. We tested that hypothesis by identifying all non-native bees among 11,275 total bees previously collected from 45 species of flowering woody landscape plants across 213 urban sites. Honey bees, Apis mellifera L., accounted for 22% of the total bees and 88.6% of the non-native bees in the collections. Six other non-native bee species, accounting for 2.86% of the total, were found on 16 non-native and 11 native woody plant species. Non-Apis non-native bees in total, and Osmia taurus Smith and Megachile sculpturalis (Smith), the two most abundant species, were significantly more abundant on non-native versus native plants. Planting of favored non-native hosts could potentially facilitate establishment and spread of non-Apis non-native bees in urban areas. Our host records may be useful for tracking those bees’ distribution in their introduced geographical ranges.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-28-2022
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.3390/insects13030238
Funding Information
This research was funded by USDA-NIFA-SCRI grant 2016-51181-235399 administered through IR4 Grant 2015-34383-23710, the Horticultural Research Institute, the University of Kentucky Nursery Research Endowment Fund, and USDA–NIFA Hatch Project no. 2351587000.
Related Content
The dataset analyzed for this study is available at UKnowledge, the University of Kentucky’s open-access data repository: https://doi.org/10.13023/69rg-pn90 (accessed on 24 February 2022).
Repository Citation
Potter, Daniel A. and Mach, Bernadette M., "Non-Native Non-Apis Bees Are More Abundant on Non-Native Versus Native Flowering Woody Landscape Plants" (2022). Entomology Faculty Publications. 235.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/entomology_facpub/235
Notes/Citation Information
Published in Insects, v. 13, issue 3, 238.
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).