Congratulations Miranda Lede for defending her thesis on the influence of climate and phenology on solitary bees

Yesterday, Miranda Lede defended her undergraduate (licenciatura) thesis at the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the National University of Cuyo. Miranda was interested in how climate and mismatches in the timing (phenology) of flowering and bee nesting influenced the demography of solitary bees. To address this question she used data from our group’s database on flowering and solitary bee nesting between 2006 and 2019. She worked in Villavicencio Nature Reserve, a private protected area north of the city of Mendoza. Her study was based on five species of solitary bees that fall in a gradient of specialization, from highly specialized species feeding mostly on pollen of a single plant species, to generalists feeding on several plant species. Miranda found that phenological mismatches and climate tend to influence the reproductive success of the most specialized bee species, while climate alone seems to influence the reproduction of the most generalized bees. The two examiners of the thesis praised Miranda for her excellent work. Congratulations Miranda!