Abstract | Keywords | Export | Availability | Bookmark

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Pollinators are essential for a major part of flowering plants. By transporting pollen from one flower to the other, reproduction is made possible. Especially insects are important pollinators. We know that insect communities are declining at alarming rates. This decline could have a serious impact on plant reproduction in the future. It is important to understand the interactions between plants and pollinators to the best of our abilities so we can take adequate measures to protect pollinators from further decline. The pollination interaction is often characterised as a network with certain properties that reveal the general patterns structuring plant-pollinator interactions. Most networks are made at pollinator species level. However, there is ample evidence that individuals within the species differ in their foraging behaviour. Also differences between sexes are commonly observed. Networks that only consider insects at species level thus lose valuable information as a result of generalising individuals from the same species. The goal of our study was to evaluate whether there were differences in foraging between sexes and between individuals within the same insect species. We analysed the pollen present on individual insects and identified the plant species they collected pollen from with metabarcoding. Then we made three plant-pollinator networks that differed in pollinator levels, one at species level, one at sex level and one at individual level. We analysed the patterns and properties of these networks and compared them with each other. Our research revealed that individuals of the same insect species indeed differed in foraging behaviour. There were also significant differences in foraging between the sexes of the red-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius) and the hairy-legged mining bee (Dasypoda hirtipes). When comparing the three networks we also found significant differences in three network properties. The individual based networks were more specialised and more connected. Our results thus confirm that plant-pollinator networks at species level lose important information compared to networks at individual level. We think it is important that more pollination studies take individual pollinator behaviour into account, so we have a more accurate representation of plant pollinator interactions.