Bumblebees in a region of northwestern Scania: Is species number correlated to the number of flowering angiosperms and does gene flow occur between four locations?

Pollination, one of our ecosystem services, is considered to be in critical condition due to a worldwide reduction in pollinators and their biodiversity. As the agricultural landscape becomes more and more intense, the pollinators lose important food and living resources. In temperate ecosystems, bumblebees (Bombus spp) are an important group of wild pollinators, and as with pollinators in general, they are declining in both abundance and richness, in Sweden as well as other countries. The purpose of this study was to see if bumblebee species number of a location is linked to the location’s number of flowering angiosperm species in northwestern Scania when examining eight locations, and to see if gene flow existed between four chosen locations. The result of this study suggests that it is not possible to tell from the flowering angiosperm species how many bumblebee species that will be abundant, but that it might be possible to tell the number of bumblebee individuals. With the number of bumblebee species, the abundant Fabaceae species was more important than the total number of flowering angiosperms of the location. The number of abundant Fabaceae species was strongly correlated to the bumblebee diversity index of the locations, indicating that it is a group of flowers closely linked to bumblebees. To see if gene flow occurred between the chosen locations, mtDNA sequences were compared in neighbor joining trees. The result showed that though some tendencies of isolation existed, gene flow seemed to occur in general between the locations in that fragmented and human dominated landscape of northwestern Scania