Do local and landscape context affect the attractiveness of flower gardens to bees?

Planting floral resources is a common strategy for increasing the abundance and diversity of beneficial flower-visiting insects in human-modified systems. However, the context of the local area and surrounding landscape may affect the attractiveness of these floral resource provisioning plots. We compared the relative effects of local floral resources and surrounding urban land-use on the abundance of bees on flowering plants in common gardens in eastern Tennessee, USA. We planted four types of common garden plots at each of five different landscapes representing a variety of surrounding land use: 1) Urban Garden, 2) Forage Grassland, 3) Mixed Agriculture, 4) Forest, and 5) Organic Farm. Each common garden plot type had a fixed plant community representing one of three plant families (Asteraceae, Fabaceae, Lamiaceae) or a mix of all three, and all four common gardens were replicated at all the sites. We concurrently sampled bees in the garden plots and in a 50 m radius (local area) around the garden plots. We found that the size of the floral display (i.e. the visual display size of flowers) and diversity of flowers in the local area did not affect bee abundance or species richness in the garden plots. Although there was a significant positive association between developed land use in a 2 km radius and bee abundance in the gardens, the effect was small, and there was no relationship between land use and bee abundance or species richness in the local area. There were significant differences in the composition of the bee community between the local area and garden plots, but the largest determinants of bee community composition and species richness in the gardens were floral display size and variation in the garden plant species in bloom. This finding is promising for anyone wishing to promote pollinator populations by providing more floral resources.

Host Bloodmeal Identification in Cave-Dwelling Ornithodoros turicata Dugès (Ixodida: Argasidae), Texas, USA.

Tick-host bloodmeal associations are important factors when characterizing risks of associated pathogen transmission and applying appropriate management strategies. Despite their biological importance, comparatively little is known about soft tick (Argasidae) host associations in the United States compared to hard ticks (Ixodidae). In this study, we evaluated a PCR and direct Sanger sequencing method for identifying the bloodmeal hosts of soft ticks. We collected 381 cave-associated Ornithodoros turicata near San Antonio, Texas, USA, and also utilized eight colony-reared specimens fed artificially on known host blood sources over 1.5 years ago. We correctly identified the vertebrate host bloodmeals of two colony-reared ticks (chicken and pig) up to 1,105 days post-feeding, and identified bloodmeal hosts from 19 out of 168 field-collected soft ticks, including raccoon (78.9%), black vulture (10.5%), Texas black rattlesnake (5.3%), and human (5.3%). Our results confirm the retention of vertebrate blood DNA in soft ticks and advance the knowledge of argasid host associations in cave-dwelling O. turicata.