Greenleaf Sarah S, Kremen Claire
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006 Sep 12;103(37):13890-5. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0600929103. Epub 2006 Aug 29.
Pollinators are required for producing 15-30% of the human food supply, and farmers rely on managed honey bees throughout the world to provide these services. Yet honey bees are not always the most efficient pollinators of all crops and are declining in various parts of the world. Crop pollination shortages are becoming increasingly common. We found that behavioral interactions between wild and honey bees increase the pollination efficiency of honey bees on hybrid sunflower up to 5-fold, effectively doubling honey bee pollination services on the average field. These indirect contributions caused by interspecific interactions between wild and honey bees were more than five times more important than the contributions wild bees make to sunflower pollination directly. Both proximity to natural habitat and crop planting practices were significantly correlated with pollination services provided directly and indirectly by wild bees. Our results suggest that conserving wild habitat at the landscape scale and altering selected farm management techniques could increase hybrid sunflower production. These findings also demonstrate the economic importance of interspecific interactions for ecosystem services and suggest that protecting wild bee populations can help buffer the human food supply from honey bee shortages.
全球15%-30%的人类食物供应都需要传粉者，世界各地的农民都依赖人工养殖的蜜蜂来提供这些服务。然而，蜜蜂并非对所有作物都是最有效的传粉者，而且在世界不同地区数量都在减少。作物授粉短缺现象日益普遍。我们发现，野生蜜蜂与蜜蜂之间的行为互动可使蜜蜂对杂交向日葵的授粉效率提高多达5倍，平均每块田地的蜜蜂授粉服务实际上增加了一倍。野生蜜蜂与蜜蜂之间的种间相互作用所产生的这些间接贡献，比野生蜜蜂对向日葵授粉的直接贡献重要五倍多。与自然栖息地的距离以及作物种植方式，都与野生蜜蜂直接和间接提供的授粉服务显著相关。我们的研究结果表明，在景观尺度上保护野生栖息地以及改变特定的农场管理技术，可以提高杂交向日葵的产量。这些发现还证明了种间相互作用对生态系统服务的经济重要性，并表明保护野生蜜蜂种群有助于缓解因蜜蜂短缺给人类食物供应带来的影响。
