Biodiversity in Bees and its Critical Role in a Thriving Ecosystem

Although bumblebees and honeybees get all the attention, other bees are just as important to a thriving ecosystem.

According to recent research, pollinator diversity is far more important than the bees that are frequently in the spotlight.

Researchers have discovered that less common bees are more important to ecosystem health than previously thought, Treehugger reported.

All Bees Matter

Michael Roswell, an entomologist at the University of Maryland, collaborated with co-authors Lucia Weinman and Dylan Simpson to learn more about the importance of biodiversity in a healthy ecosystem.

Weinman and Simpson observed that in different communities, different bee species play different roles, which did not fit into some emerging findings that the most common or dominant species are doing almost all the work.

The two drafted a way to explore the roles of rare and common species in more naturalistic contexts.

For the study, the team used data they collected from nearly a dozen locations in New Jersey over one year. The plots observed for the research included seeded wild meadows and fields.

Roswell explained that their study suggests that as ecosystems get more complex, biodiversity may get more important because ecosystem services and processes arise from lots of species, and these species contribute in a variety of ways.

More than 180 species of bees were discovered, with nearly 22,000 visits to more than 130 plant species.

The pollination role of each type of bee with each plant was estimated using these visits. This was done because the bees that visit plants the most are usually the most important pollinators.

The team discovered that the more plant species there are in a location, the more the ecosystem depends on a diverse group of bees to pollinate them.

Roswell explained that different species provide pollination services to different plants in different ways, at different times, and in different ways.

He stated that this is not surprising as this fact had been established long before that study.

The consequences of changes and losses in biodiversity, Roswell later added, are a huge, looming question for ecologists. Because most species are rare, ecologists believed that rare species are more vulnerable to extinction.

However, because many ecosystem processes are driven by common species, it is tempting to believe that declining biodiversity will have only minor consequences for ecosystems.

Furthermore, Roswell stated that their study has revealed how species that seem rare and not important are often playing critical roles.

Earlier studies on the roles of bees as pollinators often focused on specific plants or all plants in an ecosystem, treating them as if they were one species, according to the researchers.

In these cases, the findings frequently exaggerated the importance of common bees, even though only 2% of bee species are responsible for 80% of crop pollination.

The Other Bees in the Block

Roswell pointed out that in New Jersey, there are likely over 400 species of wild bees. Fewer than 5% are bumblebee species.

Their study revealed that bumblebees make up a quarter to half of the pollinators.

He pointed out that honeybee and bumblebee populations decline frequently, landing the two species in the news more often.

Less common bees are more vulnerable to extinction due to factors such as habitat loss, pollution, and climate change, whereas common bees are frequently studied due to their high visibility.

Roswell further explained that both bumblebees and honeybees are larger-bodied, social organisms that can have large colonies, so they often gather in large numbers on flowering resources, and they're easy to see and hear.

They are very effective pollinators in many systems.

Read also: Leaf Fossils in Borneo Reveals Rainforest Biodiversity in the Island 4 Million Years Ago

Roswell stated that sweat bees and small carpenter bees, spring-flying miner bees and mason bees, and other bees are also important pollinators in both crops and wild systems.

The entomologist warned that the said species may also be in trouble and that learning more about their ecology and their role in pollination is a first step to conserving the bee species and the ecosystems they support.

Roswell also emphasized that in the past several decades, ecology has coalesced around findings from experiments that show that ecosystem functions increase with biodiversity up to a certain level.

The team wanted to understand how those results scale up to real-world ecosystems, which are much more complex.