Land management and food resource landscapes for bees in southern Mississippi

Understanding how landscape changes impact the spatial configuration of resources for threatened species is crucial to preserving biodiversity and ecosystem services. Bees are the world’s most important pollinators, but many populations and communities are threatened by habitat loss from anthropogenic land use.  In order to maintain healthy and robust bee communities in areas where we rely on their pollination services the most, we must understand how land management practices influence the distribution of resources across these novel landscapes.  Here we measured and mapped bee food resources, including six important mass-flowering shrubs, across a managed pine plantation in southern Mississippi.  We examined how spatial arrangement of food resources varies with patch successional age.  We also compared flower visitors at sites used as forage land for managed honey bees and sites without managed honey bee hives to identify potential at-flower foraging competition between honey bees and native bees for these food resources. Observations suggest that age since clear cutting has a significant relationship with density and distribution of bee food resources. These results have major implications for managing landscapes for bees; patch size and patch configuration can mean long distances between food resources relative to nest sites, which can have negative reproductive consequences. Though our comparison of flower visitation at sites with and without honey bee hives suggest minimal competition with native species, the control sites differed significantly from both treatments.  As historical habitats and forage for both native and honey bees continue to disappear, it becomes increasingly important to understand the dynamics between land management and resource availability in order to provide suitable new habitat within our anthropogenic landscapes. Additionally, potential competition between managed bees that are critical to our agricultural systems and native bees must be mitigated by providing sufficient forage in order to maintain the services of native bees as supplemental pollinators and buffers against managed bee losses.