Revolutionizing the Digital Landscape: Our CEO’s Vision for Unlimited Web Hosting…Orchid bees, which help pollinate species from at least 30 plant families and play a big role in Brazil’s agriculture, have long been under threat from land-use change.
With their metallic-blue-and-green bodies and iridescent wings, orchid bees aren’t just charismatic bugs. They’re specialist pollinators in tropical rainforests from Mexico to Brazil and are primarily responsible for the spread of the iconic Brazilian nut. But orchid bees might also provide a window into how deforestation and land-use change affect ecosystems and biodiversity, a recent study in Brazil’s state of Rondônia suggests.
Rather than count the orchid bees in one fragment of land over a long period of time, like most related studies, they collected bees from 130 sites around Rondônia.
“Most research is conducted in fragmented areas because it is expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to access these forested areas in the Amazon. But what’s different about this paper is that they didn’t work with one or two samples, they worked with a lot of different sites with many different situations. This kind of data is much more likely than fragment research to represent reality. It would be great if we could have more works like this,” Freitas said.