Mola J.M., M.R. Miller, S. O’Rourke and N.M. Williams. 2020. Forests do not limit bumble bee foraging movements in a montane meadow complex. Ecological Entomology, Early View Online
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Using genetic mark-recapture we find that bumble bee foraging is not restricted by forest “barriers”.
Instead, siblings separated by longer distances (across these habitat types) are usually foraging on different plant species. Possibly suggesting a resource-based motivation for relatively long distance foraging.
There’s a bunch of other little gems in there. You’ll find estimates of B. vosnesenskii (they go far) and B. bifarius (they go not as far) foraging range and a (probably) novel way of using dissimilarity metrics to look at the shared number of colonies between sites.
I also tagged a bunch of individuals (250+ vosnesenskii) and recaptured a whopping 3 of them at a site different from their original tagging location.
One of those individuals however…3406 meters from her original spot! Overall, I think along with other recent work (referenced in discussion), it suggests habitat conservation and restoration for (bumble) bees ought to focus on the overall abundance of forage rather than the “connectivity” of the patches.
This was one of my chapters of my dissertation. Thank you to my committee members!
And thank you to whoever reviewed this thing!
FWIW: Ecological Entomology was a great journal to work with and I highly recommend them to others.