The Importance of Bee - Flower Interactions
The interactions between plants and pollinators, especially bees, can be considered one of the most important terrestrial mutualisms on Earth. Not only do bees support natural plant populations by facilitating plant reproduction by pollination, this process is also extremely important for human food security globally. In turn, bees receive their entire nutrition from floral rewards of pollen and nectar. Adult bees collect these rewards not only for themselves, but to feed their offspring, and developing larvae need pollen to develop into healthy adults.
Because bees and flowers interact at a community level, research in this field addresses a wide variety of scientific and applied topics from the organism to entire ecosystems. To name a few, these include: 1) taxonomy and systematics, 2) bee physiology, health and development, 3) pollination, nutritional, and chemical ecology, 4) foraging behavior, 5) drivers of community interactions and assembly, 6) biogeography and geographic mosaic of coevolution of symbioses and mutualisms, 7) the evolution of biodiversity, 8) population genetics and dynamics, and of course 9) agricultural productivity and sustainability. However, with the wide knowledge gained about pollination and all the factors contributing to plant-pollinator interactions throughout scientific history, predicting how and why bees visit particular flowers at any given time, and why these may change over time is still an elusive topic. My research seeks to unify and synthesize the above topics to understand the fundamental drivers of the relationships of bees and flowers, and how these can be used to improve conserving our natural resources. |