DOI: 10.5061/dryad.zcrjdfnj4
title: Data for: Patch fidelity and patch preference of honey bees and bumble bees

description: Animals commonly exhibit a tendency to return to previously visited
 locations. Such tendency is manifested at different scales, for example
 fidelity to a site, or fidelity to a specific patch within a site.
 Although patch fidelity has important implications for the pollinators and
 the plants they visit, our understanding of patch fidelity, and the extent
 to which it varies among bee species, remains limited. Here, we used a
 mark-reobservation approach to compare patch fidelity and patch size
 preference between one bumble bee and one honey bee species foraging on
 patches of Medicago sativa L. Honey bees exhibited greater patch fidelity
 (76%) than bumble bees (47%); they were more likely to return to the patch
 where they were marked. Patch size affected the level of patch fidelity
 for bumble bees but not for honey bees. Bumble bees were more likely to
 return to larger relative to smaller patches. In addition to patch
 fidelity, we detected preference of bees for the larger patches. Bees
 visited the larger patches more often than the smaller patches. These
 results add patch fidelity to the already known repertoire of differences
 in foraging strategies between a bumble bee and a honey bee species. It
 also indicates how the simultaneous study of distinct species in a similar
 environment can reveal important previously undetected information about
 their behavioral ecology.  Observed differences in patch fidelity
 and patch size preferences may have important implications for crop
 pollination and conservation habitat design.
description: We conducted two experiments with a center patch, surrounded by
 four peripheral patches of two different sizes and distances from the
 center, to compare patch fidelity and patch size preference between the
 two bee species. The center and two of the peripheral patches were 9.14 m
 x 9.14 m and contained 100 plants (small), while the other two peripheral
 patches were 13.7 m x 13.7 m and contained 225 plants. One of the large
 and one of the small patches were located 9.14 m diagonally from the
 center patch, while the other large and small patches were located 18.3 m
 away. The five patches in the design were referred to, for identification
 purpose, as the center patch (C), the large near (LN), small near (SN),
 large far (LF) and small far (SF) patches. Peripheral patches of the same
 size were located on the same side of the center patch, in this case
 north.  Individual bumble bees and honey bees foraging
 in one of the five alfalfa patches were caught and marked with uniquely
 numbered patch-dependent colored disks. After marking, the bee was
 released in the patch where it was captured. We then surveyed patches
 every hour between 9am and 3pm daily, following the first day of marking
 bees, for a period slightly longer than bee marking (July 29- August 31 in
 2020, and July 8-August 2 in 2021). Two observers walked standard paths
 between adjacent rows of alfalfa plants, each starting at opposite ends of
 a patch. When a marked bee was spotted foraging on plants to the right or
 left of an observer, the time of day, patch type, and tag information on
 the bee were recorded and the present data set was thus
 generated. Al data tabulations were performed using
 dplyr and tidyr packages in the Tidyverse collection of R packages
 (Wickham et al. 2019) in R version 4.0.3 (R Core Team, 2020);  we used
 chi-square goodness of fit test to determine whether patch fidelity varied
 among patches; we examined the impact of patch size on patch fidelity
 using a mixed linear model with patch size as a fixed effect and year as a
 random variable, with the lme4 package in R (Bates et al. 2015); we used
 chi-square goodness of fit tests to determine whether the total number of
 observations were equally distributed among patches, with a null
 hypothesis of random distribution, i.e. 0.20 per patch; we determined
 whether the pattern of patch preference differed between bumble bees and
 honey bees using a chi-square of independence test.