Phenology and flowering overlap drive specialisation in plant–pollinator networks

Abstract

Variation in dietary specialisation stems from fundamental interactions between species and their environment. Consequently, understanding the drivers of this variation is key to understanding ecological and evolutionary processes. Dietary specialisation in wild bees has received attention due to their close mutualistic dependence on plants, and because both groups are threatened by biodiversity loss. Many principles governing pollinator specialisation have been identified, but they remain largely unvalidated. Organismal phenology has the potential to structure realised specialisation by determining concurrent resource availability and pollinator foraging activity. We evaluate this principle using mechanistic models of adaptive foraging in pollinators within plant–pollinator networks. While temporal resource overlap has little impact on specialisation in pollinators with extended flight periods, reduced overlap increases specialisation as pollinator flight periods decrease. These results are corroborated empirically using pollen load data taken from bees with shorter and longer flight periods across environments with high and low temporal resource overlap.Understanding the drivers of organisms’ dietary specialisation is a fundamental question in ecology. Here we investigate the temporal aspects influencing specialisation in wild bees using complimentary theoretical and empirical approaches. Results indicate that the degree of temporal overlap among different resource options can drive dietary specialisation in bees via the length of their foraging periods.