Tracking pollinator movements and resource use in response to environmental stressors at a landscape scale

蜜蜂在食物生产和促进野生开花植物繁殖方面发挥着关键作用。在加拿大，大黄蜂在春天出现，经常在农场周围嗡嗡作响，参观开花的水果和蔬菜作物。像其他蜜蜂一样，大黄蜂似乎也在人类影响的景观中挣扎。重要食物栖息地和筑巢地的丧失和破碎化、更多的农药暴露、寄生虫/病原体的更高风险以及气候变化都是野生蜜蜂面临的挑战，而这些因素共同作用时可能更加有害。虽然大黄蜂可能是加拿大野生蜜蜂中最明显和研究得最好的，但我们对它们的基本生态学的理解仍然存在很大的空白，我们需要填补这些空白，以便更有效地保护这些传粉者。特别是对大黄蜂女王的研究很少，所以我们不知道它们从地下冬眠出来后要走多远才能找到食物和可能的筑巢地点，在那里它们可以开始自己的殖民地。同样，在夏末，对新出现的处女蜂王的传播距离的估计也有很大的不同，因为它们必须找到一个配偶，然后找到一个安全的地方埋葬自己，以便在冬眠中度过寒冷的冬天。我们将着手填补这些重要的知识空白，使用独特的无线电跟踪阵列与49接收器塔自动跟踪标记的大黄蜂的运动在实时。我们还将研究大黄蜂工蜂在吸引蜜蜂的大田作物（如蓝莓）上的空间觅食模式，并了解这些模式是如何受到农场景观中栖息地分布和可用性的支配的。我们还将调查暴露于现场实际水平的杀虫剂对无线电标记的蜂王和工蜂行为的潜在亚致死影响。特别是对于蚁后来说，即使是正常行为的细微变化也会对她成功地找到巢穴或抚养一个群体产生深远的影响。通过允许许多秋季蜂王将自己埋在飞行围栏中，以收集对大黄蜂冬季存活率的可靠估计，而幸存者将在春季再次出现。跟踪工人之间的遗传相关性也将使我们了解当地人口结构的年度波动。这个项目的一个主要目的是将所有这些关于关键生活史转变的新数据汇集在一起，为大黄蜂群体的生命周期建立一个生态上现实的人口模型。这样一个基于事实的模型将使我们更好地理解环境压力因素是如何通过影响个体蜜蜂的生理和行为来扰乱群体的成功的，特别是如果这是蜂王。全面了解不同大黄蜂物种生存和繁衍的关键栖息地要求，使我们对蜜蜂生物学有了更广泛的了解，也提高了我们提供有针对性的建议和行动的能力，以保护大黄蜂作为重要的传粉者。

Bees play a critical role in food production and facilitating reproduction of wild flowering plants. In Canada, bumblebees emerge in spring and are often seen buzzing around farms visiting the blooms of fruit and vegetable crops. Like other bees, bumblebees also seem to be struggling in human influenced landscapes. Loss and fragmentation of important habitat for food and nesting sites, greater pesticide exposure, higher risks from parasites/pathogens and climate change are all challenges for wild bees, and these factors may be more harmful when acting together. Although bumblebees are perhaps the most apparent and best studied of Canada's wild bees, there are still big gaps in our understanding of their basic ecology that we need to fill in order to conserve these pollinators more effectively. Bumblebee queens in particular are poorly studied so we have little idea of how far they travel after emerging from hibernation underground to find food and possible nest sites where they can start their own colony. Similarly estimates of the dispersal distances of newly emerged virgin queens in late summer vary hugely at a time they must find a mate and then a safe place to bury themselves to survive the cold winter in hibernation. We will set out to fill these important knowledge gaps using a unique radio tracking array with 49 receiver towers to automatically follow the movements of tagged bumblebees in real time. We will also examine spatial foraging patterns of bumblebee workers on bee attractive field crops (e.g. blueberry) and see how these are governed by the distribution and availability of habitat in the farmed landscape. We will also investigate the potential sublethal effects of exposure to field realistic levels of pesticides on the behaviour of radio-tagged queens and workers. Particularly for queens even a subtle change from normal behaviour could have a profound effect on her success at finding a nest site or raising a colony. Robust estimates on the rate of bumblebees surviving winter will be collected by allowing many fall queens to bury themselves in flight enclosures into which survivors will emerge again in spring. Tracking the genetic relatedness among workers will also inform our understanding of annual fluctuations in local population structure. A key aim of this program is to bring together all these new data on key life history transitions to build an ecologically realistic demographic model for the bumblebee colony lifecycle. Such a ground-truthed model will allow us to better understand the ways in which environmental stressors perturb colony success by affecting individual bee physiology and behaviour, particularly if this is the queen. Building a complete understanding of the key habitat requirements for different bumblebee species to live and thrive gives us wider insights into bee biology and also increases our ability to provide targeted advice and action to conserve bumblebees as essential pollinators.