ArticleScientific reports2023
Honeybees' foraging choices for nectar and pollen revealed by DNA metabarcoding.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- Community Structure and Foraging Behavior of Flower-Visiting Insects in a Sweet Cherry Orchard in Eastern Gansu, China.Insects · 2026Article
- Review
- Inferring plant-bee-microbe associations: Foragers, hive workers, and honey tell complementary stories.PloS one · 2026Article
- Effect of formic acid treatment on Apis mellifera foraging behavior using nanopore metabarcoding technologies.PloS one · 2026Article
- Analysis of antennal transcriptome and gustatory receptor genes in Apis cerana cerana collecting pollens from different nectar source plants.BMC genomics · 2025Article
- Tracing the botanical origins of UK heather honey by relative quantification of plant DNA.NPJ science of food · 2025Article
- A Short-Read Amplicon Sequencing Protocol and Bioinformatic Pipeline for Ecological Surveillance of Dipteran Disease Vectors.Molecular ecology resources · 2025Article
- Seasonal and Landscape-Driven Variations in Forage Resources ofEcology and evolution · 2025Article
- Pollen genotyping by SABER-MassARRAY reveals that fewer than half of honey bee visits can cross-pollinate a self-incompatible crop.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- From Chemical Composition to Antiproliferative Effects Through In Vitro Studies: Honey, an Ancient and Modern Hot Topic Remedy.Nutrients · 2025Review
- Space and Time Dynamics of Honeybee (Biology · 2025Article
- Foraging resource partitioning between Indian native Apis florea and Apis cerana: unveiling entomological signatures in honey through honey DNA metabarcoding.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Molecular Assessment of Genes Linked to Honeybee Health Fed with Different Diets in Nuclear Colonies.Insects · 2025Article
- A nutritionally complete pollen-replacing diet protects honeybee colonies during stressful commercial pollination-requirement for isofucosterol.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The Latitudinal Biotic Interaction Hypothesis revisited: contrasting latitudinal richness gradients in actively vs. passively accumulated interaction partners of honey bees.BMC ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- DNA in honey could describe the changes in flower visits and microbe encounters of honey bees over decades.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Pollen collection by the western honeybee and common eastern bumble bee foraging in a common landscape and applications for agri-environment schemes.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Spatio-temporal variation in pollen collected by honey bees (Apis mellifera) in rural-urban mosaic landscapes in Northern Europe.PloS one · 2025Article
- A guide to sunflowers: floral resource nutrition for bee health and key pollination syndromes.Frontiers in plant science · 2025Review
- Multiresidue Methods Analysis to Detect Contamination of Selected Metals in Honey and Pesticides in Honey and Pollen.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Honeybees are the most widespread managed pollinators of our food crops, and a crucial part of their well-being is a suitable diet. Yet, we do not know how they choose flowers to collect nectar or pollen from. Here we studied forty-three honeybee colonies in six apiaries over a summer, identifying the floral origins of honey and hive-stored pollen samples by DNA-metabarcoding. We recorded the available flowering plants and analyzed the specialized metabolites in honey. Overall, we find that honeybees use mostly the same plants for both nectar and pollen, yet per colony less than half of the plant genera are used for both nectar and pollen at a time. Across samples, on average fewer plant genera were used for pollen, but the composition was more variable among samples, suggesting higher selectivity for pollen sources. Of the available flowering plants, honeybees used only a fraction for either nectar or pollen foraging. The time of summer guided the plant choices the most, and the location impacted both the plants selected and the specialized metabolite composition in honey. Thus, honeybees are selective for both nectar and pollen, implicating a need of a wide variety of floral resources to choose an optimal diet from.
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