Six—year pollinator count results

Take a look at the summary of six years of community science pollinator counts at Pine Point Park - Butterfly Landing. In the field, we noticed that pollinator abundance was affected by flower abundance, and flower abundance was connected to weather/drought. You could also make the assumption that with climate change – blooms will be erratic opposed to the normal seasonal blooms.  The question is – will specialist pollinators be able to adjust to these erratic weather patterns and changing host plant blooms?

At Pine Point Park, in the year after a burn or hay, the big blue stem did not suppress the flowering plants as much, and there were more pollinators those years.  There are other factors that affect pollinator emergence and even affect biological changes like bee tongue length such as temperature and elevation.

In a Colorado study, native specialist bees emerged too late after its host plant had already bloomed.  So the bee missed its host plant entirely (asynchrony).

Study in Belgium:

“We found that depriving female bees of nectar and pollen after they emerge reduced their flower visitation rate, which may have caused females to produce smaller offspring by reducing their nest-provisioning rate. Results also indicate that the consequences of phenological asynchrony for solitary bees may increase in severity as the duration of asynchrony increases.

This suggests that low flower densities during early spring could have negative consequences for pollinator reproduction. In addition, bee species with late-spring or summer phenologies may also be negatively affected by phenological asynchrony if they become decoupled from host plants that provide essential nutritional components in their diet. The reduced ability of specialist pollinators to shift host plants may make them more vulnerable to low resource availability and nutritional imbalance compared to generalist foraging pollinators.”

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1439179121001237