In Sardinia and Germany, there were Selleck BTK inhibitor significant differences in loss rate (proportion of foragers lost per hour) among B. terrestris populations

(F2,4.769=7.903, P=0.031: Fig. 3). In neither location did the native population have the lowest loss rate (Table 1), and in both Sardinia and Germany the same relative pattern of mean loss rates was observed among the three tested populations (B. t. sassaricus >B. t. terrestris>B. t. canariensis: Fig. 3). In fact, there was no significant effect of location on the relative losses of the three tested populations (F1,2=0.313, P=0.632). In Sardinia, the native population (B. t. sassaricus) actually suffered the highest mean loss rate (mean±se=0.117±0.050% of foragers lost per hour). That is more than twice that of B. t. terrestris

(0.059±0.020%) and three times that of B. t. canariensis (0.039±0.005%) at that location. In Germany, B. t. sassaricus again suffered the highest mean loss rate (0.277±0.185%), followed by the native population B. t. terrestris (0.106±0.031%) and B. t. canariensis (0.059±0.041%). In contrast, results from the UK experiments were less clear cut. Although the population representing the local native coloration (B. t. dalmatinus) had a lower mean loss rate (0.045±0.028%: Fig. 3) than B. t. canariensis (0.098±0.070%), this difference was not statistically significant (F1,1=1.597, P=0.426). Considering potential size differences, we found no difference in the departure weight BYL719 of lost bees compared with those that returned to the nest (paired t-test, t=1.17, d.f.=20, P=0.256). Our spectral analysis found UV reflectance

of the white abdominal segments of all Bombus terrestris populations except the Corsican one, although some authors have dismissed the possibility of such reflectance (Williams, 2007). However, even though this UV reflectance did not differ among the bumblebee populations used in our transplant experiments, there are clear and highly visible differences in the colour patterns of the tested populations from the perspective of a potential avian predator, 上海皓元医药股份有限公司 and more importantly, between the respective native populations and some of the ones we introduced experimentally. This is especially true for the black and white B. t. canariensis, which is visually dissimilar from any native species or bumblebee population in all of the habitats tested: there are simply no similarly patterned large, plainly black-and-white insect species in Sardinia, South Germany or England – hence these bees’ appearance should have been wholly unfamiliar to local insectivores. However, in our study, native populations did not consistently have the lowest loss rates. On the contrary, in Sardinia, the native population actually had the highest losses. This suggests that a pattern of body coloration unfamiliar to local predators did not appear to expose bumblebees to a higher predation risk at the three sites studied here.