A scientific note on the differential handling behaviour of two large carpenter bees on an inverted keel flower

Abstract

Solitary bees forage for nectar and pollen to mass-provision their offspring and to meet their own nutritional requirements (Michener 2007; Danforth et al. 2019). While nectar is an energyrich resource for bees, being mainly comprised of carbohydrates, pollen constitutes a major source of proteins together with lipids and other nutrients (Leach and Drummond 2018). In contrast with social bees, which more commonly specialise on the collection of one resource at a time, solitary bees often collect nectar as well as pollen on the same foraging bout, though foraging patterns can be structured by floral resource availability (Willmer and Stone 2004). Landscape composition becomes particularly relevant for polylectic bees, which can exploit a wide variety of host-species belonging to many families of flowering plants (Cane and Sipes 2006)...