Native bees provide a diversity of ecosystem services, including the pollination of crops and wildflowers. Most of the 20,000 described species of bees are generalists and pollinate a large number of plants. The others are specialists and only pollinate specific plants. It was long thought that bees had evolved towards greater specialization from a generalized ancestor, but recent studies have shown that the evolution of generalization from specialist ancestors may be more common. This project will investigate the direction and frequency of changes in diet breadth within the bee genus Melissodes, which has 130 species and ranges from Canada to Argentina. Pollen will be collected from the legs of bees and identified by comparing Internal Transcribed Spacer DNA sequences isolated from the pollen samples to reference sequences in GenBank. Evolution of diet breadth within Melissodes will then be reconstructed using a well-supported molecular phylogeny as a framework.
This award will train a doctoral student, Masters students and undergraduates, including members of underrepresented groups, in diverse systematics methods. This award will also develop an online key to help identification of different Melissodes bee species that can be used by both specialists and the general public.
