Ponnuchamy Raja, Bonhomme Vincent, Prasad Srinivasan, Das Lipi, Patel Prakash, Gaucherel Cédric, Pragasam Arunachalam, Anupama Krishnamurthy
Department of Ecology, French Institute of Pondicherry, UMIFRE 21 CNRS-MAEE/USR 3330, Pondicherry, India; Department of Botany, Kanchi Mamunivar Centre for Post-Graduate Studies, Pondicherry, India.
Department of Ecology, French Institute of Pondicherry, UMIFRE 21 CNRS-MAEE/USR 3330, Pondicherry, India.
PLoS One. 2014 Jul 8;9(7):e101618. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0101618. eCollection 2014.
The aim of the study was to use melissopalynology to delineate the foraging preferences of bees in tropical environs. This was done by comparing pollen spectra obtained from the same hives every three months for three years at four sampling locations (in two sites) within a confined landscape mosaic. If melissopalynology is highly replicable, the spatial variation of the pollen spectrum from the honey samples would be much more than the temporal (inter-annual) variations. In other words, given the three factors, Month, Year and Location, honey pollen from different Locations, in a given Year and Month, would be much less similar than samples from different Years, in a given Location and Month. We then determined how the factors, Month, Year and Location, influenced the pollen influx of honey. The pollen analyses of the 42 honey samples collected during the three years yielded 80 pollen taxa/types: 72 dicotyledonous and 8 monocotyledonous, encompassing 41 botanical families spread into seven life forms namely, trees, shrubs, epiphytes, herbs, climbers, grasses, and sedges. Our results showed that pollen spectra were equally comparable between Locations and between Months and Years; the importance of this result is that it helped to demonstrate the complexity of ecological/environmental phenomena involved in the process of foraging by bees in a heterogeneous and complex landscape.
本研究的目的是利用蜂蜜花粉分析法来描绘热带环境中蜜蜂的觅食偏好。这是通过在一个有限的景观镶嵌区内的四个采样地点（分两个区域），对同一蜂箱每三个月采集一次花粉光谱，持续三年来完成的。如果蜂蜜花粉分析法具有高度可重复性，那么蜂蜜样本中花粉光谱的空间变化将远大于时间（年际）变化。换句话说，在给定的年份和月份，不同地点的蜂蜜花粉彼此间的相似程度，会远低于在给定的地点和月份，不同年份的样本之间的相似程度。然后，我们确定了月份、年份和地点这几个因素是如何影响蜂蜜中的花粉流入量的。对三年间采集的42份蜂蜜样本进行的花粉分析共产生了80个花粉分类群/类型：72个双子叶植物类和8个单子叶植物类，涵盖41个植物科，分布在七种生命形式中，即乔木、灌木、附生植物、草本植物、攀缘植物、禾本科植物和莎草科植物。我们的结果表明，不同地点之间以及不同月份和年份之间的花粉光谱具有同等的可比性；这一结果的重要性在于，它有助于证明在异质且复杂的景观中，蜜蜂觅食过程中所涉及的生态/环境现象的复杂性。
