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ORIGINAL PAPER

Pollen specialists are more endangered than non‑specialised bees even though they collect pollen on flowers of non‑endangered plants Petr Bogusch1   · Eliška Bláhová1 · Jakub Horák1 Received: 22 October 2019 / Accepted: 12 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Abstract Non-parasitic bees differ in the degree of their taxonomic specialisation for pollen collection to feed their brood. Surveys of published data on pollen specialisation by bees of central Europe showed that about two-thirds of species are pollen generalists (polylectic) while the remainder only collect pollen of one family, genus or species (monolectic and oligolectic). Proportions of monolectic and oligolectic species among bee families and genera in central Europe varies widely, from the entirely pollen-specialised but small family Melittidae, to the mostly polylectic Halictidae and Apidae. The Asteraceae plant family attracts the most monolectic and oligolectic species, followed by Fabaceae, Brassicaceae and Campanulaceae. Several plant families in central Europe host only a single bee species. Of the species included in the Red List of bees of Czechia, oligoleges are proportionally more strongly represented than polyleges. Most of these red-listed oligoleges are associated with specific and regionally endangered habitats, i.e. steppes or wetlands. Most of the bees are more limited by the presence of their habitat or nesting site than by the host plant, although this fact is not simple to evaluate due to the incomplete data on the floral relations and distribution of bee species. Keywords  Bees · Monolectic · Oligolectic · Polylectic · Flower · Red list · Habitat

Introduction For most of the public, concern over the fates of bees is connected solely with the commercial honey bee (Apis mellifera Linnaeus, 1758) due to its value in pollination of crops and production of honey. Recent studies of this species have shown its managed and probably feral populations have significantly declined in most of the studied regions in the world (Watanabe 1994; Becher et al. 2013; Kovács-Hostyánszki et al. 2019). This decline of managed honeybees has raised alarms both in scientific literature and popular media because their sharp decline threatens the pollination and Communicated by Christina Mogren and Heikki Hokkanen. Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (https​://doi.org/10.1007/s1182​9-020-09789​-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Petr Bogusch [email protected] 1



Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, University of Hradec Králové, Rokitanského 62, 500 03 Hradec Králové, Czech Republic

yields of many commercial crops (Henry et al. 2012; Goulson et al. 2015), although currently the number of colonies is increasing (Wood et al. 2020). However, the honeybee is the only one of thousands of species of bees around the world that pollinate both wild and the commercial flowering plants; obviously, the diverse wild flora of continents where the honeybee was int