We have a new paper in GCB lead by Romina. In this paper we do a very cool thing. We characterize the daily activity period of a bunch of bee species and how this activity is modulated by temperature. We show that while honeybees decrease visitation to watermelon at very high temperatures (literature suggest that the reason is that honeybees need to go for water more often when hot, hence have less time to visit flowers), some native bees concentrate its visits on the warmer hours. I think that understanding behavioural differences among species is neat to answer BEF questions.

In addition, we play a bit with future temperature scenarios to see if (all else being equal) visitation and pollen deposition will change with warmer temperatures. We show that the visitation reduction predicted for honeybees is compensated by an increased visitation rate by native bees (taken altogether). Despite this predictions should be interpreted with care, it adds up to the several lines of evidence suggesting that conserving all species is needed in order to have flexible ecosystems able to cope with environmental change.