Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Commons^™

The Intersection Of Bee And Flower Sexes: Pollen Presence Shapes Sex-Specific Bee Foraging Associations In Sunflower, Justin C. Roch, Rosemary Malfi, Jennifer I. Van Wyk, Deicy Carolina Muñoz Agudelo, Joan Milam, Lynn S. Adler

Data and Datasets

We evaluated whether female or male bees were more abundant on sunflowers, whether female bees were more abundant on pollen-fertile or pollen-sterile sunflower cultivars, and whether the bee community differed between pollen-fertile and pollen-sterile sunflower cultivars. We further evaluated whether bee communities were shaped by local floral resources and landscape composition. We sampled bees visiting sunflowers (Helianthus spp.) from 14 farms in the Connecticut River Valley of western Massachusetts between 25 July to 27 September 2019, typically making two sampling visits to a farm. We also measured floral resource diversity and abundance at the farms, and categorized the landscape types …