Friday 10 May 2019

With flower preferences, bees have a big gap between the sexes


Female and male bees of the same species frequent different flowers, study finds
Date:  April 24, 2019
Source:  Rutgers University
For scores of wild bee species, females and males visit very different flowers for food -- a discovery that could be important for conservation efforts, according to Rutgers-led research.
Indeed, the diets of female and male bees of the same species could be as different as the diets of different bee species, according to a study in the journal PLOS ONE.
"As we get a better sense of what makes flowers attractive to different kinds of bees, maybe we can get smarter about bee conservation," said lead author Michael Roswell, a doctoral student in the lab of senior author Rachael Winfree, a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Five years ago, when Winfree Lab members were evaluating federally funded programs to create habitat for pollinators, Roswell noticed that some flowers were very popular with male bees and others with females. That spurred a study to test, for as many wild bee species as possible, whether males and females visit different kinds of flowers.

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