Department of Biological Sciences, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY, USA.
Department of Biology, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Sci Rep. 2021 Dec 3;11(1):23368. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-02727-9.
Insect pollination is among the most essential ecosystem services for humanity. Globally, bees are the most effective pollinators, and tropical bees are also important for maintaining tropical biodiversity. Despite their invaluable pollination service, basic distributional patterns of tropical bees along elevation gradients are globally scarce. Here, we surveyed bees at 100 m elevation intervals from 800 to 1100 m elevation in Costa Rica to test if bee abundance, community composition and crop visitor assemblages differed by elevation. We found that 18 of 24 bee species spanning three tribes that represented the most abundantly collected bee species showed abundance differences by elevation, even within this narrow elevational gradient. Bee assemblages at the two crop species tested, avocado and squash, showed community dissimilarity between high and low elevations, and elevation was a significant factor in explaining bee community composition along the gradient. Stingless bees (Tribe Meliponini) were important visitors to both crop species, but there was a more diverse assemblage of bees visiting avocado compared to squash. Our findings suggest that successful conservation of tropical montane bee communities and pollination services will require knowledge of which elevations support the highest numbers of each species, rather than species full altitudinal ranges.
昆虫传粉是对人类最重要的生态系统服务之一。在全球范围内，蜜蜂是最有效的传粉者，热带蜜蜂对于维持热带生物多样性也很重要。尽管它们具有宝贵的传粉服务，但热带蜜蜂在海拔梯度上的基本分布模式在全球范围内仍然很少。在这里，我们在哥斯达黎加 800 至 1100 米的海拔高度上以 100 米的海拔间隔调查了蜜蜂，以测试蜜蜂的丰度、群落组成和作物访问者组合是否因海拔而不同。我们发现，在代表最丰富采集的蜜蜂物种的三个部落中的 24 种蜜蜂中有 18 种表现出海拔差异，即使在这个狭窄的海拔梯度内也是如此。在测试的两种作物（鳄梨和南瓜）上，蜜蜂群落表现出高海拔和低海拔之间的群落差异，并且海拔是解释沿梯度蜜蜂群落组成的重要因素。无刺蜜蜂（Tribe Meliponini）是这两种作物的重要访客，但与南瓜相比，访问鳄梨的蜜蜂种类更多。我们的研究结果表明，要成功保护热带山地蜜蜂群落和传粉服务，需要了解哪些海拔高度支持每个物种数量最多，而不是物种的全海拔范围。
