Pollination and communication ecology of exotic spreadings

Bees are invaluable for nature and to us humans due to their ability to pollinate. They play a central role in the functionality of ecosystems and food security. Bees search for suitable host plants that offer nectar and/or pollen food for the adult bee and its offspring. To attract bees, plants use especially specific colors and floral scents. Over millions of years, native bees and host plants have adapted to gather food efficiently and to be optimally pollinated, respectively. In recent decades, bees have increasingly been introduced into regions that are foreign to them. These introduced bees encounter unfamiliar plants in their new environment. To survive, exotic bees must find suitable flowers that can serve as new food sources. So far, science knows little about the relationships between new host plants and introduced bees or how these new host plants are found. With this study we address these questions for the first time by examining plant signals (colors and scents) and their effects on Europe’s first invasivebee, Megachile sculpturalis, also known as the sculptured resin bee. Originally from East Asia, this bee has successfully spread in Europe and North America over the past decades.  It visits both native and introduced plants in its new habitats, such as the invasive kudzu. Kudzu also originates from East Asia, where it is the primary food source for the sculptured resin bee. In Europe and North America, kudzu causes devastating damage by rapidly overgrowing infrastructure and native plants. Therefore, it is listed as one of the hundred worst invasive spreadings worldwide. A mutualism between kudzu and the sculptured resin bee could lead to the rapid spread of both organisms, negatively impacting native biodiversity. We investigate whether the sculptured resin bee pollinates kudzu in Europe, and studies the impact of this potential pollination on the invasive plant and how the bee finds kudzu and native plants in Europe.

Project:  https://www.fwf.ac.at/en/research-radar/10.55776/PAT3025323

PostDoc: Dr. Julia Lanner

PhD student: Julia Witter, MSc