The effect of 10 years of repeat lethal sampling on wild bee abundance

Abstract

Insect pollinators serve vital roles in natural and agricultural systems. There is a lack of long-term data on wild bee populations in North America, so standardized sampling protocols have been developed to address this need. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of 10 years of long-term, repeated lethal sampling through the use of aerial netting and pan traps on wild bee abundance. Several single-sample sites were sampled and compared to phenologically similar sites that had been repeatedly sampled for a decade. In this paper, we focus on the bumble bees only. We predicted to find no effect of repeated sampling on bumble bee abundance or diversity because they are not lethally sampled but, rather, identified in the field and released. We found no significant difference between the catch rate and species richness for bumble bees caught among single-sample and their paired repeated-sample sites. This suggests that the paired sites are suitably comparable, and allows us to move forward in the analysis of the lethally sampled, solitary bees’ catch rate and species richness among the single-sample and repeated-sample sites.