Version 1
: Received: 17 June 2021 / Approved: 17 June 2021 / Online: 17 June 2021 (15:40:28 CEST)
Version 2
: Received: 15 July 2021 / Approved: 16 July 2021 / Online: 16 July 2021 (13:04:52 CEST)
How to cite:
Donkersley, P.; Covell, L.; Ota, T. Japanese Honeybees (Apis Cerana Japonica Radoszkowski, 1877) May Be Resilient to Land Use Change. Preprints2021, 2021060468. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202106.0468.v1
Donkersley, P.; Covell, L.; Ota, T. Japanese Honeybees (Apis Cerana Japonica Radoszkowski, 1877) May Be Resilient to Land Use Change. Preprints 2021, 2021060468. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202106.0468.v1
Donkersley, P.; Covell, L.; Ota, T. Japanese Honeybees (Apis Cerana Japonica Radoszkowski, 1877) May Be Resilient to Land Use Change. Preprints2021, 2021060468. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202106.0468.v1
APA Style
Donkersley, P., Covell, L., & Ota, T. (2021). Japanese Honeybees (Apis Cerana Japonica Radoszkowski, 1877) May Be Resilient to Land Use Change. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202106.0468.v1
Chicago/Turabian Style
Donkersley, P., Lucy Covell and Takahiro Ota. 2021 "Japanese Honeybees (Apis Cerana Japonica Radoszkowski, 1877) May Be Resilient to Land Use Change" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202106.0468.v1
Abstract
Pollinators are being threatened globally by urbanisation and agricultural intensification, driven by a growing human population. Honeybees are part of a wide suite of insect pollinators with a global distribution. Understanding the impacts of landscape change and other influencing factors on pollinators is critical to ensuring food security and ecological stability. Remote sensing data on land use attributes have previously linked honeybee nutrition to land use in the Western Honeybee (Apis mellifera L.). Our study presents preliminary data comparing forage (honey and pollen) with land use across a rural-urban gradient from 22 sites in Kyushu, Southern Japan. Honey samples were collected from managed hives between June 2018 and August 2019. Pollen were collected and biotyped from hives in urban and rural locations (n = 5). Previous studies of western honeybee honey shows substantial variation in monosaccharide content. Our analysis of A. cerana japonica honey found very little variation in glucose and fructose (which accounted for 97% of monosaccharides), despite substantial differences in surrounding forage composition. As expected, we observed temporal variation in pollen foraged by A. cerana japonica, likely dependent on flowering phenology. These results suggest that A. cerana japonica may be resilient previously observed negative effects of urban land use on pollinator nutrition. We suggest this effect could be due to differences in urban green infrastructure in Japan, or due to an adaptation by A. cerana japonica to their surroundings, meaning landscape change may not be as detrimental to A. cerana japonica as has been observed elsewhere in the world.
Keywords
Pollinator; landscape; land use; urban rural gradient; Japanese honeybee; honey; pollen; nutrition.
Subject
Environmental and Earth Sciences, Atmospheric Science and Meteorology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
