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It is now widely recognized that bees are among the most important pollinators worldwide, yet the bee faunas of many regions and habitats remain inadequately documented. The Great Basin Desert in North America is thought to host some of the richest bee communities in the world, as indicated by several studies documenting diverse bee faunas in the region’s natural habitats. However, limited attention has been given to the bee communities present on agricultural lands within the Great Basin Desert. Here, we describe a rich bee community housed at the Young Living Lavender Farm in Juab County, Utah, near the eastern edge of the Great Basin Desert. Our survey of bees on this farm identified 68 bee species across 22 genera. This represents 34% of the bee species known from the county, including 34 new county records. Among the numerous flower species cultivated at the farm, we found that lavender supported the richest bee community, with 32 species collected from cultivated lavender fields. While lavender is frequently recommended for homeowners to plant in support of pollinators, our study is among the first to provide a list of bee species that visit lavender in western North America. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that agricultural lands, particularly those implementing pollinator-friendly farming practices, can support rich bee communities in the Great Basin Desert.

Pollination services provided by a diversity of pollinators are critical in agriculture because they enhance the yield of many crops. However, few studies have assessed pollination services in urban agricultural systems. We performed flower–visitor observations and pollination experiments on strawberries (Fragaria × ananassa) in an urban area near Paris, France, in order to assess the effects of (i) insect-mediated pollination service and (ii) potential pollination deficit on fruit set, seed set, and fruit quality (size, weight, and malformation). Flower–visitor observations revealed that the pollinator community solely comprised unmanaged pollinators, despite the presence of beehives in the surrounding landscape. Based on the pollination experiments, we found that the pollination service mediated by wild insects improved the fruit size as a qualitative value of production, but not the fruit set. We also found no evidence of pollination deficit in our urban environment. These results suggest that the local community of wild urban pollinators is able to support strawberry crop production and thus plays an important role in providing high-quality, local, and sustainable crops in urban areas.

Global declines in wild and managed bee populations represent a major concern for the agricultural industry. Such declines result, in part, from the loss of natural and semi-natural habitats in and around agricultural ecosystems. However, remaining forest patches in heavily modified landscapes represent nesting habitats that may be crucial to preserving wild bees and their services. Because wild bees are the main pollinators of fruit crops, preserving potential nesting habitats might be particularly important for the crops’ yield and profitability. Here, we assessed whether the abundance and richness of visiting wild bees in blueberry crops relates to the amount of surrounding forest cover and if so, whether those relationships varied with spatial scale. Specifically, we sampled wild bee communities in 18 blueberry fields during the blooming period in Montérégie, Quebec, Canada, where sampling consisted of pan trap triplets and direct observation of flower visitors on blueberry bushes. Then, we quantified the proportion of forest in radii of 0.5 km, 1 km, and 2 km around each field. Wild bee abundance was positively related to the proportion of forest habitat surrounding the crop field, but the relationship for wild bee richness was less clear. Moreover, these relationships were strongest at 1 and 2 km radii of measured land cover. Overall, pollinator diversity was highest when at least 30% of the surrounding landscape consisted of forest patches, representing a total area of at least 1 km2. Our results suggest that preserving large habitat patches in agricultural landscapes can help prevent further decline in wild bee diversity while maximizing pollination services to fruit crops.

Urban ecosystems can support diverse communities of wild native bees. Because bloom times are conserved by geographic origin, incorporating some non-invasive non-native plants in urban landscapes can extend the flowering season and help support bees and other pollinators during periods when floral resources from native plants are limiting. A caveat, though, is the possibility that non-native plants might disproportionately host non-native, potentially invasive bee species. We tested that hypothesis by identifying all non-native bees among 11,275 total bees previously collected from 45 species of flowering woody landscape plants across 213 urban sites. Honey bees, Apis mellifera L., accounted for 22% of the total bees and 88.6% of the non-native bees in the collections. Six other non-native bee species, accounting for 2.86% of the total, were found on 16 non-native and 11 native woody plant species. Non-Apis non-native bees in total, and Osmia taurus Smith and Megachile sculpturalis (Smith), the two most abundant species, were significantly more abundant on non-native versus native plants. Planting of favored non-native hosts could potentially facilitate establishment and spread of non-Apis non-native bees in urban areas. Our host records may be useful for tracking those bees’ distribution in their introduced geographical ranges.

Concerns about a global decline in pollinators have called for more knowledge about the factors influencing wild pollinator abundance and diversity in agroecosystems. Agricultural intensification has been identified as the main cause of this “global pollinator crisis”, particularly due to reductions in natural areas holding critical floral and nesting resources. Maintaining native wild plants in agricultural landscapes (e.g., in field margins) is often recommended as a cost-effective and efficient method for pollinator conservation. In this study, the role of common wild flowers, often considered weeds, in supporting pollinators in a Mediterranean agroecosystem was investigated. This work involved a two-year field trial to compare five native weed species common in Mediterranean cereal agroecosystems: Convolvulus arvensis L., Daucus carota L., Malva sylvestris L., Papaver rhoeas L., and Sonchus oleraceus L. The goal was to compare the attractiveness of these species, and a mixture of all five, to different flower-visiting insect groups in order to assess their value in supporting wild pollinators. Overall, D. carota had the highest number of insect visits, followed by P. rhoeas. C. arvensis, M. sylvestris, and S. oleraceus, which had lower numbers of visits. On the basis of their overall attractiveness to pollinators and low risk for invasiveness, D. carota, P. rhoeas, and M. sylvestris are the most likely to contribute positively to the conservation of pollinators in agroecosystems. Our results also suggest that it is advantageous for wild flowers sown for the purpose of pollinator conservation to be grown in clumps, rather than highly intermingled, for improved visitation rates.

Intensification of agricultural practices leads to a loss of floral resources and drives pollinator decline. Extensive agricultural practices are encouraged in Europe and contribute to the preservation of biodiversity. We compared three agricultural landscapes without extensive farming practices with three adjacent landscapes containing organic crops and extensively managed grasslands in Belgium. Nectar resource availability and plant–pollinator interactions were monitored from April to June. Flower density per plant species and plant–pollinator interactions were recorded in different landscape elements. In April, the main nectar resources were provided by linear elements such as hedgerows and forest edges. Nectar production peaked in May, driven by intensive grasslands and mass-flowering crops. Occurrence of extensive grasslands and organic crops significantly alleviated the nectar resource gap observed in June. Our results underscore the importance of maintaining landscape heterogeneity for continuous flower resources and highlight the specific role of extensive grasslands and organic crops in June.

Data collection, storage, analysis, visualization, and dissemination are changing rapidly due to advances in new technologies driven by computer science and universal access to the internet. These technologies and web connections place human observers front and center in citizen science-driven research and are critical in generating new discoveries and innovation in such fields as astronomy, biodiversity, and meteorology. Research projects utilizing a citizen science approach address scientific problems at regional, continental, and even global scales otherwise impossible for a single lab or even a small collection of academic researchers. Here we describe eButterfly an integrative checklist-based butterfly monitoring and database web-platform that leverages the skills and knowledge of recreational butterfly enthusiasts to create a globally accessible unified database of butterfly observations across North America. Citizen scientists, conservationists, policy makers, and scientists are using eButterfly data to better understand the biological patterns of butterfly species diversity and how environmental conditions shape these patterns in space and time. eButterfly in collaboration with thousands of butterfly enthusiasts has created a near real-time butterfly data resource producing tens of thousands of observations per year open to all to share and explore., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest. The founding sponsors had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; and in the decision to publish the results.