2017, Normandin-Leclerc, Étienne, Fournier, Valérie

L'urbanisation est l'activité humaine qui contribue le plus à la perte d'habitats résultant à l'extirpation d'une grande quantité d'espèces localement. Les abeilles sauvages sont les pollinisateurs les plus répandus, mais encore trop peu est connu sur la manière dont les communautés d’abeilles sont affectées par l’urbanisation et les types d’espaces verts qui favorisent leur conservation. Dans cette étude, nous avons évalué la diversité taxonomique et la diversité des traits fonctionnels des abeilles sauvages dans deux villes, Québec et Montréal, et trois habitats urbains (cimetières, jardins communautaires et parcs). Nos résultats révèlent que ces villes abritent des communautés très diverses d’abeilles, mais auraient aussi un impact sur la structure et la dynamique des communautés en soutenant des espèces abondantes et exotiques. L’analyse de la diversité des traits fonctionnels a démontré que l’agriculture urbaine peut contribuer de manière substantielle à la présence de communautés d’abeilles aux traits fonctionnels diversifiés et vraisemblablement au service de pollinisation urbain.

2017-03-07, Normandin-Leclerc, Étienne, Vereecken, Nicolas J., Fournier, Valérie, Buddle, Christopher M.

Urbanization is one of the major anthropogenic processes contributing to local habitat loss and extirpation of numerous species, including wild bees, the most widespread pollinators. Little is known about the mechanisms through which urbanization impacts wild bee communities, or the types of urban green spaces that best promote their conservation in cities. The main objective of this study was to describe and compare wild bee community diversity, structure, and dynamics in two Canadian cities, Montreal and Quebec City. A second objective was to compare functional trait diversity among three habitat types (cemeteries, community gardens and urban parks) within each city. Bees were collected using pan traps and netting on the same 46 sites, multiple times, over the active season in 2012 and 2013. A total of 32,237 specimens were identified, representing 200 species and 6 families, including two new continental records, Hylaeus communis Nylander (1852) and Anthidium florentinum (Fabricius, 1775). Despite high community evenness, we found significant abundance of diverse species, including exotic ones. Spatio-temporal analysis showed higher stability in the most urbanized city (Montreal) but low nestedness of species assemblages among the three urban habitats in both cities. Our study demonstrates that cities are home to diverse communities of wild bees, but in turn affect bee community structure and dynamics. We also found that community gardens harbour high levels of functional trait diversity. Urban agriculture therefore contributes substantially to the provision of functionally diverse bee communities and possibly to urban pollination services.

2019-11-09, McCune, Frédéric, Normandin-Leclerc, Étienne, Mazerolle, Marc J., Fournier, Valérie

Wild bees provide pollination services and are currently declining at the global scale. A potential cause for this decline is competitive interactions with domestic honey bees. Urban beekeeping, a fairly new activity, is rapidly gaining popularity. In contrast with agricultural and natural areas, the extent of competition between honey bees and wild bees in urban areas is unclear. The objectives of this study were to quantify the impact of honey bees, urbanization, and the availability of floral resources on wild bee communities. We hypothesized that honey bees exert negative impacts on wild bees, that floral resources favor wild bee communities and mitigate the negative impacts of competition with honey bees, and that the influence of heat islands, used as a proxy for urbanization, varies between wild bees with their functional traits (nesting behavior). We tested these hypotheses with a data set of 19,077 wild bee specimens collected using colored pan-traps at 25 urban sites in 2012 and 2013. We investigated community and population patterns after accounting for imperfect detection probability. We found no evidence of competition between wild and domesticated bees. Our analyses indicate mixed effects of urban heat islands across species and positive effects of floral resources. We conclude that cities can allow the coexistence of urban beekeeping and wild bees under moderate hive densities. However, it will remain crucial to further investigate the competitive interactions between wild and honey bees to determine the threshold of hive densities beyond which competition could occur.