Land-use alteration and climate seasonality have profound effects on bee species diversity by influencing the availability of nesting and floral resources. Here, using twelve sites embedded in an agriculture-forest mosaic in the tropical highlands of Guatemala, we investigated the relative effects of climate seasonality and landscape heterogeneity on bee and floral-resource community structure and on their mutualistic network architecture. We found that climate seasonality affected bee diversity, which was higher in the wet season and associated positively with the availability of floral resources across both seasons. Bee community composition also differed between seasons and it was mainly driven by floral-resource richness and the proportion of agricultural, semi-natural and forest cover. In addition to the effects on bee diversity, climate seasonality also affected flower-bee visitation networks. We documented higher relative (null model corrected) nestedness in the dry season compared to the wet season. Niche partitioning as a result of competition for scarce resources in the dry season could be the process driving the differences in the network structure between seasons. Furthermore, relative nestedness was consistently smaller than zero, and relative modularity and specialization were consistently larger than zero in both seasons, suggesting the existence of isolated groups of interacting partners in all our flower-bee visitation networks. Our results highlight the effect of climatic seasonality and the importance of preserving local floral resources and natural heterogeneous habitats for the conservation of bee communities and their pollination services in tropical highlands.
Keywords: Bees; Climate seasonality; Landscape heterogeneity; Mutualistic networks; Neotropics.