Calibrating the data logger…
Functioning ecosystems rest on countless small interactions, and few are as consequential as the exchange between a flowering plant and the insects that move its pollen. The vast majority of flowering plant species depend on animal pollination to set see,d and the resources plants offer in return sustain the insect communities that provide it. Water availability influences plant reproduction in multiple ways, including by directly influencing resources available to support vegetative growth and seed production and indirectly by altering floral rewards for insect pollinators. Because pollinators respond to the quantity and quality of pollen and nectar, changes in water availability may alter foraging behavior; however, other floral traits like floral display size and height also vary with water availability, making it difficult to determine how insects respond to variation in specific rewards like pollen availability. I tested how two manipulations —water addition and pollen removal— influenced insect visitation to Heliomeris multiflora in four subalpine meadows at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory during the unusually dry summer of 2026. Using a 2 × 2 factorial design crossing watering (watered vs. unwatered) with pollen status (pollen present vs. pollen brushed off), I conducted 189 five-minute surveys on 80 focal plants. Visitation was low and dominated by zeros: 121 visits across 189 surveys, of which 30 were bumble bees. Neither of our manipulations, nor their interaction, significantly affected visitation by bumble bees or by other insect visitors. Bumble bees and other visitors responded to the treatments in opposite directions, and pooled visitation per flower-head was nearly identical across all four treatment combinations. Watering also failed to change the morphological traits that we measured for each plant: watered and unwatered plants did not significantly differ in flower-head number or height.
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