Although urban gardens are often celebrated for supporting bee abundance and diversity within cities, little is known about how garden management and urbanization levels influence bee foraging behavior and ability to utilize resources within these landscapes. Specifically, the preferences and diet breadth of bees may depend critically on local and landscape conditions in human-managed, urban environments. To understand how foraging patterns and pollen preferences are influenced by urban landscape composition, we first examined if bees visit plants grown within urban gardens and second assessed the relationships between local floral resources, urban land cover, and pollen collection patterns, focusing on 20 community gardens across 125 km of the California central coast. We targeted a well-studied, essential native pollinator in this ecoregion, Bombus vosnesenskii, and analyzed pollen on the bodies of individuals collected in our study gardens to compare their contents to local and landscape garden composition factors. We found that greater landscape-level urban cover and greater plant species richness in the garden both drove higher within-garden pollen collection. We also found that B. vosnesenskii preferred ornamental plant species over highly available crop species in the gardens. Our study indicates that landscapes that support plant diversity, including both ornamental plants and sustenance-oriented food crops, promote greater within-garden pollen collection patterns, with likely benefits for urban garden food production.

尽管经常以支持城市中的蜂类丰富性和多样性而闻名，但人们对花园管理和城市化水平如何影响蜜蜂觅食行为和利用这些景观中资源的能力知之甚少。具体而言，蜜蜂的喜好和饮食范围可能严重取决于人类管理的城市环境中的本地和景观条件。为了了解觅食方式和花粉偏好如何受到城市景观组成的影响，我们首先考察了蜜蜂是否拜访了城市花园中种植的植物，然后评估了当地花卉资源，城市土地覆盖率和花粉收集方式之间的关系，重点研究了20个社区花园横跨加州中部海岸125公里。我们瞄准了这个生态区域中经过充分研究的，必不可少的本地传粉媒介，Bombus vosnesenskii，并分析了我们研究花园中收集的个体的花粉，以将其含量与当地和景观花园的构成因素进行比较。我们发现，更大的景观水平城市覆盖度和花园中更大的植物物种丰富度都推动了花园内花粉的收集。我们还发现B. vosnesenskii比园林中高可用的农作物物种更喜欢观赏植物物种。我们的研究表明，支持植物多样性的景观（包括观赏植物和以寄托为基础的粮食作物）促进了更大的花园内花粉收集方式，可能为城市园林食品生产带来好处。