The Daily Bulletin

Please join the Biology Department and the Great Lakes Center for the seminar “Hotspots of species richness and diversification rate for bees are the North American deserts”, presented by Dr. Robert Minckley today at 3:00 p.m. in Bulger Communication Center 214. Attendees are welcome to arrive at 2:30 p.m. to enjoy coffee and cookies leading up to the seminar.

Research Seminar Abstract: Bees are vegetarian wasps that collect pollen from flowers to feed their offspring, and incidentally pollinate plants at the same time. The well-known biogeographic global pattern shown by many groups, including plants, is that species richness increases towards and peaks in the tropics. Despite the intertwined evolutionary history of bees and plants, patterns of bee diversity do not follow that of their plant hosts: instead in both the eastern and western hemisphere bee richness is low in the tropics and peaks in the warm deserts. High bee species richness in deserts is partly related to the year-to-year unpredictability of bloom and the confluence of these xeric regions with other ecoregions. Pollen specialization is also more common among bees in deserts than elsewhere and may further contribute to high concentration of bee species.