dc.contributor.author | Stewart, T | |
dc.contributor.author | Bolton‐Patel, N | |
dc.contributor.author | Cresswell, J | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2021-01-28T16:04:17Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2021-01-28 | |
dc.description.abstract | 1. Bumble bees are important eusocial pollinators whose worker caste, fuelled by nectar sugar, accelerate colony growth through brood incubation, but allocating workers to nectar foraging could compromise nest thermoregulation in daytime and produce ‘incubator limitation’. 2. We hypothesise that colonies in nectar-poor habitats experience stronger incubator limitation by diverting workers from incubation to foraging, but this potential effect of habitat quality on colony fitness via task allocation is not fully understood. 3. We therefore modelled levels of nectar foraging in relation to forage richness and theoretically estimated the impact of incubator-limitation on colony fitness. Additionally, we investigated whether live colonies of bumble bees (Bombus terrestris) responded to manipulation of their sugar supply as if incubator-limited. 4. Model solutions for environmentally realistic scenarios showed that colonies allocate up to one third of workers to nectar foraging in order to avoid sugar starvation during sustained incubation. The incubator-limitation that results can strongly reduce colony reproduction, but its impact depends on the temperature regime of the nesting habitat. 5. Live colonies allocated between one sixth and one third of daytime worker effort to foraging and responded to sugar supplementation as if incubator-limited. 6. These findings suggest that forage richness and nest temperature relations could interact to affect the fitness of wild bumble bee colonies through incubator limitation. Our testable theory promises an integrative understanding of how forage quality and climate could govern the distribution and abundance of bumble bees and other eusocial insects that utilise brood incubation by their worker caste. | en_GB |
dc.format | Excel spreadsheet .xlsx | en_GB |
dc.identifier.doi | 10.24378/exe.3063 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10871/124540 | |
dc.language.iso | en | en_GB |
dc.publisher | University of Exeter | en_GB |
dc.rights | CC BY 4.0 | en_GB |
dc.subject | eusociality | en_GB |
dc.subject | nectar foraging | en_GB |
dc.subject | thermogenesis | en_GB |
dc.subject | thermoregulation | en_GB |
dc.subject | Bombus | en_GB |
dc.subject | colonial habit | en_GB |
dc.title | Eating versus heating: a study of the allocation of workers between foraging and nest incubation in bumble bees (dataset) | en_GB |
dc.type | Dataset | en_GB |
dc.date.available | 2021-01-28T16:04:17Z | |
dc.description | The dataset is presented as an Excel spreadsheet whose worksheets contain data on ingresses and egresses by worker bees at colonies of the bumble bee, Bombus terrestris. The overall aim was to determine the number of bees outside the colony in relation to time of day. In all worksheets, time of day is recorded in columns A and B, where A shows the hour on a 24-hour clock and B shows minutes after the hour. Each line indicates the time of an event (either worker ingress or egress). For data recorded in 2018, each line indicates the time of an event (either worker ingress or egress), column D (EFFECT) reports a positive value for ingress and negative for egress. For data recorded in 2019, each line indicates the events (ingress or egress) during the time interval up to the next recording and columns D and E report the frequencies of ingress and egress. For all worksheets, the estimated number of bees outside the nest is reported in column G. | en_GB |
dc.identifier.journal | Ecological Entomology | en_GB |
dc.rights.uri | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 | en_GB |
rioxxterms.version | NA | en_GB |
rioxxterms.licenseref.startdate | 2021-01-28 | |
rioxxterms.type | Other | en_GB |
refterms.dateFOA | 2021-01-28T16:04:24Z | |