This project will investigate the variations in bumblebees as elevations increase in a mountain in the Himalayan region of China. Bumblebees are important pollinators of agricultural crops contributing billions to the global economy and to the stability of the world's food supply. The Himalayas are the most diverse region of bumblebees and yet the region's bumblebee populations are largely understudied. This project will be accomplished through a collaboration with Dr. Zong-Xin Ren, an expert in pollination ecology, at the Kunming Institute of Botany. The project will study changes in the diversity of bumblebees at different elevations and how their morphology and behavior change. This will be accomplished specifically by collecting bumblebee specimens, identifying them, and taking several measurements from them and the plants they pollinate.
Bumblebee tongue length is an indicator of likely foraging behavior. Long-tongued bees tend to be specialized to forage from specific flowers with long floral tubes while short-tongued bees tend to be generalists that visit many, more open-faced flowers. As elevation increases, temperatures tend to be lowered and the growing season tends to be shorter. During shorter seasons, we would expect bees to be more generalized in their foraging behavior as they are trying to capture the maximum amount of resources in a limited time frame. This project aims to create a network model demonstrating which bumblebees pollinate which flowers, this will give scientists a greater understanding of the current functions of bumblebees in the Himalayas and might aid in the identifying of functional mismatches due to shifting weather patterns that would likely cause shifts in bumblebee ranges.
This award under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.
