Invasive honeybees are starving bat-pollinated trees of fruit
Rosas-Guerrero V, Lucas-García R, Alemán-Figueroa L, Ceballos-Torres M.
Invasive Species
If you've ever planted a tree hoping for fruit, this shows how a well-meaning backyard beehive can quietly wreck pollination for native plants that evolved to depend on a completely different pollinator.
There's a tropical tree called Crescentia alata that relies on nectar-feeding bats to carry its pollen between flowers at night, but researchers in Mexico found it barely makes any fruit at all, just two fruits for every thousand flowers. The culprit turns out to be honeybees, an introduced species that shows up in huge numbers before the bats do and eats or scatters the pollen the flowers need. The tree also has built-in weaknesses like needing pollen from a genetically different tree, so the honeybee traffic delivers a final blow to a plant already struggling to reproduce.
Key Findings
Natural fruit set was only 0.2%, indicating severe reproductive failure
The tree is self-incompatible with low herkogamy and incomplete dichogamy, making it dependent on effective cross-pollination
Invasive honeybees remove large amounts of pollen before nectar-feeding bats, the tree's most effective pollinators, arrive at night
chevron_right Technical Summary
A tropical tree that depends on bats for pollination is failing to make fruit because invasive honeybees swarm its flowers and strip the pollen before bats ever arrive, leaving fewer than 1 in 500 flowers to bear fruit.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Invasive honeybees exacerbate the low reproductive success of a bat-pollinated tree.
Some bat species play a crucial role as the main effective pollinators of many flowering plants. Nevertheless, other floral visitors may act as antagonists, affecting the reproductive success of th...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
Species Mentioned
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Crescentia is a genus of six species of flowering plants in the family Bignoniaceae, native to Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and northern South America. The species are moderate-size trees growing to 10 m (35 ft) tall, and producing large spherical fruits, with a thin, hard shell and so...