Atração visual de abelhas em Sapucaias (Lecythis pisonis): o display floral afeta a visitação de flores?

Abstract

Plant-insect interactions are evolutionarily shaped by the environment and it influences plant functional traits. In a spatial context considering the resource distribution, bees forage to increase their fitness by maximizing the acquisition of the resource and by minimizing the foraging time and energy costs. Mutualistic relationships between insects and plants have a role in character evolution and plant functional traits, such as through visual signaling. Bees can find resources in the landscape using visual or olfactory cues, and visual communication is important to detect stimuli and bees' preferences for foraging or not in a given patch. The Sapucaia trees (Lecythis pisonis) were used in this experimental study to investigate the influence of the combination of leaves and flowers, forming a potential visual attractant, on floral visitation by different bee species. The number of visits to branches when coloured leaves around flowers were removed in relation to intact branches in Sapucaias trees in Belo Horizonte municipality was evaluated. The visits were conducted by ten morphospecies of bees, with a higher frequency of small-sized bees. We found no difference in the number of visits, duration of visit and behaviour of bees interacting with Sapucaia flowers by removing non-green leaves. The size of the display, considering the close distance to bees, did not change visitation, but the pink leaves are visually distinguishable from the flowers, which should guide the location of the resource at short distances against the background of non-green leaves. In this way, we can assume that another scale attracts large bees that pollinate L. pisonis and that bees in Sapucaias use floral characteristics in their foraging decision.