Hauling field gear up Gothic Mountain…
As temperature, wind, resource availability, and competition fluctuate, pollinators are unlikely to exhibit identical foraging behaviors or remain active at the same hours. Despite intuition and first principles, not much is known about within-day pollinator activity. Fine-scale (within-day) temporal sampling provides a thorough investigation into how pollination and pollinators respond to changing environmental conditions. In 2026, a mast flowering event of Frasera speciosa occurred in early June, providing abundant floral resources. This study used F. speciosa as a system to collect empirical evidence of within-day variation in pollinator activity. Specifically, I am interested in two questions: 1) How does pollinator activity on Frasera vary across the day? And 2) How do different pollinators forage on Frasera? I hypothesize that visitation rates will be the greatest in the early morning, as the temperature is cooler. I predict that visitation by all pollinators will generally decrease throughout the day, attributed to higher temperatures in the afternoon. I further predict that Bombus will prioritize collecting nectar, whereas Megachile will prioritize collecting pollen. From June to July, pollinator activity was recorded on plots of individual Frasera speciosa plants that included taxonomic identity of pollinators, number of visits on individual flowers, and foraging behaviors. A total of 789 pollinator observations were recorded across eight full days. Within-day community-level pollinator activity on Frasera had moderately higher activity in the morning, while foraging behavior differed strongly between Bombus and Megachile.
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