Alimentation des abeilles domestiques et sauvages en système de grandes cultures

Abstract

Over the past 50 years, agricultural intensification has led to drastic changes in land cover structure and composition in Europe. To meet the increasing demands of human populations, modern open field crop systems have increased the amount and size of cereal, maize and oilseed crop fields at the expense of the diversity of local crop varieties and of semi-natural habitats like pastures, hedgerows and forested areas. Like many other organisms, bees are affected by those environmental changes. Although the so called mass-flowering crops such as oilseed rape and sunflower provide bees with locally abundant and attractive floral resources, their blooming only covers short periods of time. Professional beekeepers now have to cope with recurrent seasonal food shortage periods, and resort to transhumance and artificial feeding to limit honeybee colony losses. In the meantime, non-managed wild bee species are threatened, and many doubts persist about the effectiveness of floral resource enhancements as agro-environmental schemes to protect their diversity. We provide here a review of the recent research carried out by the UMT PrADE to document the bee foraging ecology and their interactions with cropped and natural areas in an open field agrosystem