Flower diversity may mitigate insecticide effects on wild bees

Research team led by the University of Göttingen emphasizes the benefits of diversifying flower resources. A higher diversity of flowering plants increases the breeding success of wild bees and may help compensate for the negative effects of insecticides. This is what researchers from the Universities of Göttingen and Hohenheim, as well as the Julius Kühn Institute, have found in a large-scale experimental study. The results have been published in the scientific journal Ecology Letters . In their experiment, the researchers investigated how successfully the wild bee Osmia bicornis (red mason bee) reproduced. Red mason bees are important for both ecological and economic reasons. The wild bees were experimentally kept in more than 50 large enclosure cages with flower mixtures of varying wild plant diversity and insecticide-treated oilseed rape.