Hiking up to the next plot…
Across different landscapes, plant abundance and richness change. Bee distributions may vary spatially in accordance to these differences in floral diversity. I used a habitat-based approach to investigate this hypothesis across three distinct meadow types: dry meadow, wet meadow-Veratrum and wet meadow-Salix. Patterns of bee species abundance and richness were sampled using bee bowls and netting around Gothic, Colorado. A triplet of sites (each consisting of the tree different meadow types) was sampled every other week, for a total of eight sampling days. In total, 1084 bees were caught and identified to family. I found that there was no significant difference in the number of bees caught per hour across the three meadow types; however, there was a trend of more bees caught in the dry meadows. Furthermore, there was no difference in the number of bees caught per hour within a family, though there was a significant difference between the number of Halictids and Colletids caught in both of the wet meadows. There was no significant relationship between the number of bees caught per hour and the mean number of flowers per plot within meadow types or across all sampling sites. Additionally, I used the data set to investigate whether the number of bees caught per hour changed with subsequent samplings for one triplet of sites. There were significantly more bees caught during the first sampling than the two subsequent samplings. I also looked at whether bumble bee abundance affects the abundance of solitary bees, but no significant results were found. More sampling may be needed to reveal significant patterns, or perhaps there are other mechanisms besides meadow type and flower abundances that are driving the distributions of bees in Montane meadows.
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