Aug. 22, 2013 — Ecologists have produced the most detailed picture yet of how bumblebees use the landscape thanks to DNA technology and remote sensing. The results -- which come from the largest ever study of wild bumblebee nests -- could help farmers and policy makers ensure the countryside is better suited to the needs of these vital but declining pollinators.
Despite their size and often conspicuous colouring, bumblebees are difficult to study in the wild because their nests are almost impossible to find. To work out how far bumblebees forage from their nests, a team of ecologists from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), University of East Anglia, University of Bristol, and Institute of Zoology instead took advantage of bumblebees' unusual genetics.
According to Dr Matt Heard of CEH: "All workers in a bumblebee colony are daughters of a singly-mated queen, which means they are highly related in genetic terms. We decided to exploit this interesting aspect of their biology using a novel combination of genetics, field studies and landscape modelling."
The team sampled DNA non-lethally from live wild bumblebees, including 2577 worker and 537 queen bees of five different species. Back in the laboratory they genotyped the samples, which allowed them to estimate how closely related the bees were across the landscape and group sisters, mothers and daughters into more than 2000 colonies.
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