Determining how pollinators visit plants vs. how they carry and transfer pollen is an ongoing project in pollination ecology. The current tools for identifying the pollens that bees carry have different strengths and weaknesses when used for ecological inference. In this study we use three methods to better understand a system of congeneric, coflowering plants in the genus Clarkia and their bee pollinators: observations of plant–pollinator contact in the field, and two different molecular methods to estimate the relative abundance of each Clarkia pollen in samples collected from pollinators. We use these methods to investigate if observations of plant–pollinator contact in the field correspond to the pollen bees carry; if individual bees carry Clarkia pollens in predictable ways, based on previous knowledge of their foraging behaviors; and how the three approaches differ for understanding plant–pollinator interactions. We find that observations of plant–pollinator contact are generally predictive of the pollens that bees carry while foraging, and network topologies using the three different methods are statistically indistinguishable from each other. Results from molecular pollen analysis also show that while bees can carry multiple species of Clarkia at the same time, they often carry one species of pollen. Our work contributes to the growing body of literature aimed at resolving how pollinators use floral resources. We suggest our novel relative amplicon quantification method as another tool in the developing molecular ecology and pollination biology toolbox.

中文翻译：

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花粉使用的分子分析一致地反映了开花植物系统中传粉者的访问模式

确定授粉者如何访问植物以及它们如何携带和转移花粉是授粉生态学中一个正在进行的项目。当前用于识别蜜蜂携带的花粉的工具在用于生态推断时具有不同的优势和劣势。在这项研究中，我们使用三种方法来更好地了解同属一个系统，coflowering属中的植物Clarkia和他们的蜜蜂授粉：在野外植物授粉接触的观察，和两个不同的分子生物学方法来估算每个的相对丰度Clarkia花粉在从传粉媒介收集的样本中。我们使用这些方法来研究实地观察植物与传粉媒介接触的情况是否与蜜蜂携带的花粉相符；如果单个蜜蜂携带克拉基亚根据先前对其觅食行为的了解，以可预测的方式采集花粉；以及这三种方法在理解植物 - 传粉媒介相互作用方面有何不同。我们发现对植物-传粉媒介接触的观察通常可以预测蜜蜂在觅食时携带的花粉，并且使用三种不同方法的网络拓扑在统计上无法区分。分子花粉分析的结果还表明，虽然蜜蜂可以携带多种克拉克同时，它们通常携带一种花粉。我们的工作有助于越来越多的文献，旨在解决传粉媒介如何使用花卉资源。我们建议将我们新颖的相对扩增子定量方法作为正在开发的分子生态学和授粉生物学工具箱中的另一个工具。