Date of Award

1-1-2019

Document Type

Masters Thesis

Degree Name

M.S.

Organizational Unit

Biological Sciences

First Advisor

Shannon M. Murphy, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Julie Morris, Ph.D.

Third Advisor

Robin Tinghitella, Ph.D.

Keywords

Conspecifics, Foraging behavior, Local enhancement, Local inhibition, Neighborhood effects, Pollinators

Abstract

Foraging bees use social information (e.g. presence of absence of other bees) to assess the quality of flowers when choosing a flower to visit. My research tests how bees choose to visit a particular flower once they have been recruited to a flower patch. I tested if neighborhood effects, or the relative number of bees on neighboring flowers compared to a focal flower, affected to which flower a foraging honey bee visited. I also conducted a meta-analysis to test whether bees in the super-family Apoidae are more likely to visit a flower occupied by a con- or heterospecific bee or visit an unoccupied flower, and what circumstances lead to these two different foraging behaviors. My results suggest that visual cues, or relative abundance of bees in the neighborhood, impact the number of bee visits a flower will receive, thus highlighting potential implications for pollination services and plant reproductive output.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Eva Sofia Horna Lowell

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

44 p.

Discipline

Ecology, Behavioral sciences

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Entomology Commons

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