Ellen Baker
The majority of bees are fully reliant on the pollen and nectar supplied by flowers to feed themselves and their offspring. In the same way that humans can’t survive on bread alone, bees must obtain a diet that is nutritionally balanced and fulfils all their physiological requirements. Pollen is nutritionally complex and contains a range of macronutrients such as proteins and fats, which are necessary for bee growth and maintenance, as well as micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals. However, not all flowers produce equally valuable pollens and bees will be selective in their choice of the food plant. Therefore, as plant communities change and species are lost, nutritional resources important for bees may also become absent. The challenge is we still don’t know the pollen nutritional quality of many different floral species and so are unable to understand the consequences of these changes. My research is therefore seeking to increase our understanding of the nutritional resources available from different floral pollens and analyse which are best suited to fulfilling the needs of different UK bumblebee species. This means that during the summer I mostly focus on collecting pollen and bee samples from the field, and in the winter, analysing their nutritional content. The long-term hope for this research is that it can be used alongside other nutritional data to assess the suitability of planting schemes and interventions designed to benefit bumblebees and identify key floral resources in different plant communities.
DPhil student
Contact details: ellen.baker@balliol.ox.ac.uk
Links: Graduate Research - Michaelmas 2021
Publications:
Pegoraro, L., Baker, E.C., Aeschimann, D., Balant, M., Douzet, R., Garnatje, T., Guignard, M.S., Leitch, I.J., Leitch, A.R., Palazzesi, L. and Theurillat, J.P., (2020). The correlation of phylogenetics, elevation and ploidy on the incidence of apomixis in Asteraceae in the European Alps. Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society.
