CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Apis mellifera plays a crucial role as pollinator of the majority of crops linked to food production and thus its presenceis currently fundamental to our health and survival. The composition and configuration of the landscape in which Apismellifera lives will likely determine the well-being of the hives and the pollination service that their members can provideto the crops. Here we present a spatially explicit model that predicts the spatial distribution of visits by Apis mellifera tocrops, by simulating daily trips of honey bees, the demographical dynamic of each hive and their honey production. Thismodel goes beyond existing approaches by including 1) a flower resource affected by the feedback interaction betweennectar extraction, pollination, blossoming and repeated visits, 2) a pollinators dynamic that allows competition throughshort term resource depletion, 3) a probabilistic approach of the foraging behavior, modeling the fact that the pollinatorshave only partial knowledge of the resource on their surroundings, and 4) the specific and systematic foraging behaviorand strategies of Apis mellifera at the moment of choosing foraging sites, as opposed to those adopted by solitary andwild pollinators. With a balance between simplicity and realism we show the importance of keeping a minimal fractionof natural habitat in an agricultural landscape. We also evaluate the effects of the landscape?s structure on pollination,and demonstrate that there exists an optimal size of natural habitat patches that maximizes the pollination service fora fixed fraction of natural habitat.

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