Periodic Reporting for period 2 - BEE-MOVE (Pollination ecology: how do bees move across the landscape and fashion plant reproduction?)
Reporting period: 2023-04-01 to 2024-09-30
How pollinators, such as bees, exploit plant resources is a fundamental question in biology, with deep ecological, economical and societal consequences. When foraging on flowers, pollinators transfer pollen and mediate the reproduction of plants on which most animals (including us humans) rely on. Understanding the spatial foraging strategies and interactions of pollinators across the landscape is thus a critical scientific challenge to discover their influence on plant mating patterns and pollination efficiency. BEE-MOVE uses an interdisciplinary approach to mechanistically link pollinator movements to pollination efficiency at field scales, thereby crossing boundaries between research on pollinator behaviour and plant ecology. We focus on two key pollinators worldwide: the buff-tailed bumblebee and the Western honey bee. Our first objective is to develop a new radar system to record and analyse the individual 3D movements of hundreds of bees foraging simultaneously. Our second objective is to use arrays of communicating radars and robotic plants to study how bees search and exploit food resources in field setups of several square kilometres, by manipulating key environmental factors such as the density of bees, the 3D distribution of plants, and the nutritional content of nectars and pollens. From these observations, our third obkective is to build computational agent-based models to investigate the influence of bee spatial strategies on pollination efficiency. The dialogue between observations and simulations creates a positive feedback towards a robust, multi-level understanding of plant-pollinator interactions at the scale of landscapes. In addition to exploring entirely new grounds in pollination ecology, our results could be used to design practical interventions for conservation, sustainable agriculture and green development in the worrying context of pollinator declines.
During the first part of the project, we made significant methodological progress to study the spatial foraging behaviour of bees in the field. We developed a new radar system capable of monitoring the 3D flight paths of multiple bees simultaneously. This new technology is used to track the movement patterns of bees foraging on robotic plants in a dedicated field site, in which we can manipulate resource distribution, abondance and quality. Based on these data, we developed behavioural models of bee movements.
During the second part of the project, we will cross boundaries between research on pollinator behaviour and plant ecology. Specifically, our methodological and theoretical advances will enable us to explore the influence of environmental parameters on bee movements and their impact plant reproduction patterns, based on pollen dispersal. We will test the hypothesis that bees with different spatial strategies have different impact on pollination efficiency.