Whilst we know a lot about the foraging preferences of honey bees, little is known about the foraging preferences of bumblebees. In this new study, we show that whilst the majority of foraging bumblebees are generalists (feeding on both pollen and nectar), some bumblebees do specialise on only foraging for pollen, and some specialise on nectar. Believing this may be linked to the different sizes of bumblebee foragers that a colony produces, we set about looking for relationships between this foraging preference and the body size, fat content, sucrose sensitivity and ovary size of the workers.
To learn more about this work, which was led by Dr Adam Smith (now at George Washington University), please click here
The first thing i must say, is this was a HUUUGE event! Far bigger than any other conference i have attended. There was a total of 6,682 delegates from 102 countries! Spread over a large venue, it really was a race to get to the different talks in time with 10’s of talks taking place at any one time it took most of a morning to plan each day! The topics were diverse across the entire diversity of insects (as you can imagine), and frustratingly, but maybe not surprisingly, many of the bee talks weren’t necessarily near the rooms where the parasite or microbiome talks were being done! That couldn’t stop me from being excited to be there though and see as many talks as i could! I should also mention that i was there, in part, because of the generosity of the ESA who kindly awarded me an Early Career STEP travel award to attend and present my work – THANK YOU ESA!
Well, somehow in between all the talks and the running around i was able to meet some great new friends, many of whom i’ve read a lot of their awesome work! Also, i got the chance to catch-up with post-docs and supervisors of christmas past! A postdoc from my time at the University of Leeds, Dr. Adam Smith, is about to publish some bumblebee behaviour work we did together from our time at Leeds, which is fantastic! and Dr. Seirian Sumner will shortly become a reader at UCL!