Pollen Diet Assessment and Flower Association
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Pollen diet assessment and flower association in Melipona orbignyi and recommendations on management and conservation of stingless bees in the Chaco dry forest of South America Favio Gerardo Vossler To cite this version: Favio Gerardo Vossler. Pollen diet assessment and flower association in Melipona orbignyi and rec- ommendations on management and conservation of stingless bees in the Chaco dry forest of South America. Apidologie, Springer Verlag, 2019, 50 (4), pp.391-413. 10.1007/s13592-019-00653-4. hal- 02907009 HAL Id: hal-02907009 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02907009 Submitted on 27 Jul 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Apidologie (2019) 50:391–413 Original article * INRA, DIB and Springer-Verlag France SAS, part of Springer Nature, 2019 DOI: 10.1007/s13592-019-00653-4 Pollen diet assessment and flower association in Melipona orbignyi and recommendations on management and conservation of stingless bees in the Chaco dry forest of South America Favio Gerardo VOSSLER Laboratorio de Actuopalinología, CICYTTP (CONICET/PROV. ENTRE RÍOS/UADER), Dr. Materi y España, E3105BWA, Diamante, Entre Ríos, Argentina Received 25 January 2018 – Revised 17 January 2019 – Accepted 26 April 2019 Abstract – Management and conservation of wild pollinators in forests of the Chaco region of South America is of great interest nowadays as they are pollen vectors that improve the reproductive success of many forest species which are at risk due mainly to forest patch isolation and degradation by human activities. The assessment of the diet of the stingless bee Melipona orbignyi was carried out by comparing different calculations from palynological data being the index of relative importance (IRI) the most complete, objective, and here recommended. This index showed that the order of the four most important pollen resources was Prosopis (IRI = 3354), Albizia inundata (1999), Cynophalla retusa (921), and Solanum type 2 (693), and the value of importance of species (SI) calculated for honey resources showed that they were type Maytenus (SI = 20.79), Prosopis (18.73), Cynophalla retusa (6.72), and Ziziphus mistol (3.32). Three flower types predominated in pollen and nectar provisions: brush flowers, solanoid flowers with poricidal anthers, and generalized small pale flowers, being the former two associated to buzzing. The abundance of the nectarless Solanum in honey samples is discussed. Good forest management practices for pollinator conservation native to the Chaco forest should include the keeping of undisturbed forest patches for nesting and foraging while the surrounding forest resources are managed in a sustainable way. Furthermore, because some threatened plants important for the M. orbignyi diet require gene flow to maintain healthy populations, short distances among the forest patches are needed, a fact that also helps to avoid genetic drift in Melipona colonies. The rational rearing of Melipona orbignyi would be a good practice to be implemented to promote pollination of threatened tree and shrub individuals isolated by forest fragmentation. brush flower / buzz pollination / deforestation / forest pollination / meliponiculture / pollen vector / pollinator conservation / solanoid flower / understory pollinator 1. INTRODUCTION pollinator interaction and potential pollination in diverse communities. Among pollinators, sting- The knowledge of the diet of wild pollen vec- less bees are a special group as their perennial tors provides interesting information on plant- colonies of many individuals can be reared inside boxes or trunks in a rational way for many years and so increasing the pollination of the surround- Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-019-00653-4) ing native plants (Venturieri et al. 2003; contains supplementary material, which is available to Cortopassi-Laurino et al. 2006; Roubik 2006). authorized users. Among meliponines, Melipona species are espe- Corresponding author: F. Vossler, cially important in forest conservation as they are [email protected] capable of cross-pollination within 2 to 2.4-km Manuscript editor: Alexandra Klein radius (Roubik and Aluja 1983;Araújoetal. 392 F. G. Vossler 2004). On the other hand, the remaining together (Dalmazzo and Vossler 2015). Pollen vol- meliponines concentrate their foraging within ume biomass is important in the study of bee diets, short distances from their nests, typically on as it can greatly vary among the plants foraged. crowns of mass-flowering trees with small gener- Another method includes the ranking of the total alized flowers (Wilms et al. 1997;Ramalho2004; harvested pollen volume (Villanueva-Gutiérrez and Monteiro and Ramalho 2010). Nowadays, repro- Roubik 2004). Plant resources foraged by bees and duction of most Chaquenian forest species is be- stored in nests have also successfully been estimat- ing threatened by degrading human activities and ed by indices of diversity and evenness (Kleinert- fragmentation as patches are many times small Giovannini and Imperatriz-Fonseca 1987; and are far apart (Aizen and Feinsinger 1994a, Cortopassi-Laurino and Ramalho 1988;Kajobe 1994b; Lin and Bernardello 1999; Zak et al. 2006; Cortopassi-Laurino et al. 2009;Vossler 2004;Ferreyraetal.2007;Vesprinietal.2011; et al. 2010; Hilgert-Moreira et al. 2013;Ferreira Bessega et al. 2012). This is also true for many and Absy 2015) and multivariate methods forest around the world (Brown and Albrecht 2001; (Ramalho et al. 2007;RechandAbsy2011; Brosi et al. 2008;Brosi2009;Ferreiraetal.2015). Vossler 2013, submitted ; Vossler et al. 2014). Melipona orbignyi (Guérin) belongs to Melipona Stingless bees (tribe Meliponini) are considered group favosa (Camargo and Pedro 2013), which as a broadly polylectic bee group (Cane and Sipes includes many circum-Amazonian species from 2006); however, different degrees of polylecty Argentina (25° S) to Panamá (9° N) (Nates-Parra were detected for different species and genera ac- and Roubik 1990). According to the interpretation cording to the spatial and temporal analysis of the of Nates-Parra and Roubik (1990), M. orbignyi is a sampling performed (Vossler 2018). Only polytypic species (these authors merged it with Melipona species are able to vibrate flowers to Melipona phenax Cockerell and Melipona legitimately collect large amounts of pollen grains lunulata Friese); therefore, M. orbignyi ranges from poricidal anthers usually from Solanum from Argentina to Panamá. Schwarz (1932)had (Solanaceae), Senna (Fabaceae, Papilionoideae, noticed that coloration patterns are variable among Cassiinae) and Melastomataceae (Ramalho et al. these taxa including Melipona baeri Vachal. Thus, 1989; Marques-Souza 1996; Nunes-Silva et al. the polytypic M. orbignyi reaches the southern- 2010; Ferreira and Absy 2015). Convergent in most distributional limit in the Chaco xerophytic many lineages of bees, buzzing allowed to forest of South America (25° S). Melipona the usage of exclusive floral resources Diet assessment can be effectively achieved by and in consequence the avoidance of competition means of pollen analysis of provisions stored in with no buzzing bees. Ramalho et al. (1989)ar- stingless bee nests (Ramalho et al. 1989, 2007; gued that flowers specialized on tropical Melipona Vossler et al. 2010;Vossler2015a, 2015b, 2018), compared with the remaining stingless bees were providing diverse information helpful for conser- bisexual, of radial symmetry, white to purple col- vation and pollination purposes (Vossler et al. ored and some with poricidal anthers. At family 2018). The relative abundance of pollen types and level, it is interesting to mention that two of the its frequency in samples have been the two calcu- main pollen resources usually recorded for lations most used in bee diet studies. However, the Melipona in the Neotropics (Myrtaceae and order of importance of plants in the bee diet has Melastomataceae) are absent in the dry forest been selected arbitrarily by many authors; in many of the Chaco region, although the remaining instances, they were chosen for being the most ones (Solanaceae, Fabaceae (the three sub- abundant or the ones with the highest frequency, families), Arecaceae, Anacardiaceae and or a combination of both (Lieux 1981; Obregón Sapindaceae) (Ramalho et al. 1989, 2007; and Nates-Parra 2014), although some studies in- Marques-Souza et al. 1995) are abundant. It cluded a more accurate determination by combin- is also possible that new pollen families as ing them in a formula (Nates-Parra et al. 2013), or well as pollination syndromes with specific the most abundant and the volume biomass flower morphology were found in this sub- (Vossler et al. 2010) or the three components tropical dry forest of South America and that Pollen diet in a dry forest stingless bee 393 they were highly represented in the diet of pots per nest (and pollen from approximately 550 Melipona orbignyi (Guérin). brood cells in nest 1) were studied. Closed pots The aims of the present study