A spatial network analysis of resource partitioning between bumblebees foraging on artificial flowers in a flight cage

Cristian Pasquaretta (1) , Raphaël Jeanson (1) , Jérôme Pansanel (2) , Nigel Raine (3) , Lars Chittka (4) , Mathieu Lihoreau (1)

1 CRCA - Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale - UMR5169
2 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
3 RHUL - Royal Holloway [University of London]
4 QMUL - Queen Mary University of London

Background: Individual bees exhibit complex movement patterns to efficiently exploit small areas within larger plant populations. How such individual spatial behaviours scale up to the collective level, when several foragers visit a common area, has remained challenging to investigate, both because of the low resolution of field movement data and the limited power of the statistical descriptors to analyse them. To tackle these issues we video recorded all flower visits (N = 6205), and every interaction on flowers (N = 628), involving foragers from a bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) colony in a large outdoor flight cage (880 m 2), containing ten artificial flowers, collected on five consecutive days, and analysed bee movements using networks statistics.

Domaines: Biodiversité et Ecologie; Sciences du Vivant [q-bio]; Sciences cognitives; Interactions entre organismes; Ecosystèmes

Cristian Pasquaretta, Raphaël Jeanson, Jérôme Pansanel, Nigel Raine, Lars Chittka, et al.. A spatial network analysis of resource partitioning between bumblebees foraging on artificial flowers in a flight cage. Movement Ecology, 2019, 7 (1), ⟨10.1186/s40462-019-0150-z⟩. ⟨hal-02325076⟩