Claus Rasmussen

Aarhus University | AU · Department of Agroecology

Se presenta el primer registro de la abeja de la calabaza y el zapallo en el Perú Eucera (Peponapis) fervens (Smith 1879) (Hymenoptera: Apidae), encontrada en los departamentos de Apurímac, Ayacucho, Cusco y Piura polinizando las especies de Cucurbita máxima Duchesne in Lam., C. ficifolia Bouche y C. pepo L. Además, también se reporta la presencia...

Peru, with a long history of complex and highly developed cultures, has never been the focus for a study of the traditional uses of stingless bee products. We present this through a series of reports in historical travel accounts, including the earliest reference in Europe to New World stingless bees (1553). Most uses involve cerumen, which has bee...

Stingless bee honey (SBH) is a prime natural product consumed and used for diverse medicinal and traditional purposes by local communities across the (sub-)tropics. The drivers of its compositional variation within and among species remain poorly understood, although this could inform broader and less explored eco-evolutionary theories. In this stu...

Simple Summary: Knowledge about the pollinator species as required to both value and conserve them. This study explores some of the difficulties when assessing a tropical fauna, with a large proportion left unidentified, although generalities about their biology can still be retrieved based on knowledge of the genera and related species. Abstract:...

Pollinator conservation schemes are typically focused on conserving existing-, restoring degraded- or establishing new wild bee habitats. The effectiveness of such conservation schemes depends on the presence of dispersal corridors that allow habitat colonization by bees. Nonetheless, we lack an understanding of the role of semi-natural habitats ed...

Climate change, landscape homogenization, and the decline of beneficial insects threaten pollination services to wild plants and crops. Understanding how pollination potential (i.e. the capacity of ecosystems to support pollination of plants) is affected by climate change and landscape homogenization is fundamental for our ability to predict how su...

Stingless bees are important pollinators in tropical forests. Yet, we know little about their foraging behavior (e.g., their nutritional requirements or their floral sources visited for resource collection). Many stingless bees not only depend vitally on pollen and nectar for food but also on resin for nest building and/or defense. However, it is u...

A critical study of type material for Trigona lacteipennis Friese, 1900 and allied species is presented along with a discussion of literature data. This work reveals that T. lacteipennis is a junior subjective synonym of Melipona paupera Provancher, 1889 (new synonymy), a species currently classified placed in the genus Frieseomelitta. Similarly, T...

Native stingless bees, Meliponini, are the only social bees that produce honey in addition to honeybees. These bees have been managed in meliponiculture and for crop pollination. In Ecuador, meliponiculture studies are scarce and limited by the lack of species recognition. Traditionally the taxonomic recognition of the species is based on morpholog...

The Sea Aster mining bee Colletes halophilus Verhoeff, 1944 is known as an endemic of the western European coasts of the Atlantic and the North Sea. The species has specific habitat requirements and is restricted to coastal habitats with populations of the Sea Aster (Tripolium pannonicum), its preferred host plant. Due to the late summer activity o...

Sowing flower strips along field edges is a widely adopted method for conserving pollinating insects in agricultural landscapes. To maximize the effect of flower strips given limited resources, we need spatially explicit tools that can prioritize their placement, and for identifying plant species to include in seed mixtures. We sampled bees and pla...

Pollinators play a crucial role in ecosystems globally, ensuring the seed production of most flowering plants. They are threatened by global changes and knowledge of their distribution at the national and continental levels is needed to implement efficient conservation actions, but this knowledge is still fragmented and/or difficult to access. As a...

Stingless bees (Meliponini) are a ubiquitous and diverse element of the pantropical melittofauna, and have significant cultural and economic importance. This review outlines their diversity, and provides identification keys based on external morphology, brief accounts for each of the recognized genera, and an updated checklist of all living and fos...

This paper describes the traditional knowledge on the management of stingless bee colonies and the use of honey by Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities of the department of Loreto, in the Peruvian Amazon. Semi-structured interviews and collection of voucher bees were carried out from June to August 2016 and from November to December 2017. The...

As the globe becomes more urban, the question how much natural biodiversity can subsist in cities becomes increasingly urgent to answer, and also how is urban diversity structured? To contribute to an answer, we studied the metacommunity of bees in a North European metropolitan area. The system consisted of 13 sites in the city of Aarhus, Denmark,...

Understanding how niche‐based and neutral processes contribute to the spatial variation in plant–pollinator interactions is central to designing effective pollination conservation schemes. Such schemes are needed to reverse declines of wild bees and other pollinating insects, and to promote pollination services to wild and cultivated plants. We use...

Insects provide key pollination services in most terrestrial biomes, but this service depends on a multistep interaction between insect and plant. An insect needs to visit a flower, receive pollen from the anthers, move to another conspecific flower, and finally deposit the pollen on a receptive stigma. Each of these steps may be affected by climat...

Landbrugsstyrelsen (LBST) har i en bestilling sendt til DCA – Nationalt Center for Fødevarer og Jordbrug ved Aarhus Universitet (AU) ønsket en rapport om bioressourcer, der kan anvendes til forskellige formål indenfor den grønne omstilling. Samtidig ønsker LBST, at der tages højde for eksisterende og alternative anvendelser af bioressourcer, samt m...

There is a global concern over insect declines, including both species loss and population declines. In particular, declines of species, such as bees that anchor trophic interactions and shoulder many of the essential ecosystem services, have been the focus of broad public concern. However, our understanding of what characterizes those species that...

Predicting plant–pollinator interaction networks over space and time will improve our understanding of how environmental change is likely to impact the functioning of ecosystems. Here we propose a framework for producing spatially explicit predictions of the occurrence and number of pairwise plant–pollinator interactions and of the species richness...

Since the publication of the first district catalog of Danish bees and the latest update of the checklist of bees known from Denmark, the following two species have been added as new to the country: Andrena batava Pérez, 1902 and Sphecodes hyalinatus Hagens, 1882. The bee fauna now includes 294 species known from Denmark. With an additional five ye...

The cuckoo bee Nomada bifasciata Olivier, 1811, a kleptoparasite on Andrena gravida Imhoff, 1832, was found at Voderup Klint, Ærø, in the spring of 2021 and is added to the Danish bee fauna, which thus reaches 295 species of bees known from Denmark.

Over 300 forskere fra de danske universiteter har med opbakning fra danske erhvervs- og interesseorganisationer netop udarbejdet et roadmap (vejviser) for grøn omstilling af dansk landbrug og fødevareproduktion. Kommunerne spiller en stor rolle.

The green transition of the agriculture, food and land use sector is a major and highly complex task. Meeting the combined challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and land-system change requires for actors and agencies in the agri-food complex to rethink, redeploy, and reinvent instruments and mechanisms of governance at all scales, local...

A new species of Plebeia Schwarz (Hymenoptera: Apidae) from Argentina is described and illustrated. Plebeia mansita Alvarez & Rasmussen sp. nov. occurs in the extreme northwest of the country and is restricted to the biogeographic province of the Yungas, where it is found at altitudes above 1,000 m. Observations on behavior, biology and nesting sub...

Species of Symphrasinae (Neuroptera: Mantispidae) are ectoparasitoids of larvae and pupae of holometabolous insects, primarily of Hymenoptera in their larval stages. Herein we present the third case of an association between the mantidfly genus Anchieta Navás, 1909 with the order Hymenoptera. The hymenopteran species attacked by the as of yet undes...

A recurrent concern in nature conservation is the potential competition for forage plants between wild bees and managed honey bees. Specifically, that the highly sophisticated system of recruitment and large perennial colonies of honey bees quickly exhaust forage resources leading to the local extirpation of wild bees. However, different species of...

Vilde bestøvende insekter er generelt truede. De vilde bier, dagsommerfugle og svirrefluer, som denne rapport har fokus på, stiller imidlertid forskellige krav til levestedet gennem forskellige dele af livscyklus. I rapporten er levestedskravene eller habitatressourcerne, som de også kaldes, grundigt beskrevet for humlebier, enlige bier, dagsommerf...

Tetragona Lepeletier & Serville is a genus of stingless bees with 14 recognized species occurring from Mexico to Argentina. The genus is characterized by velvety genal area, mesotibial spur present, and propodeal triangle glabrous. Within the genus, the truncata species group (T. truncata Moure and T. atahualpa sp. nov.) is characterized by worker...

Meliponiculture and associated honey production are activities with a great potential for general use and commercialization in the Peruvian Amazon. Lack of management techniques and limited knowledge of honey quality are two factors which may hinder the implementation of meliponiculture. The present study was conducted in three communities in the P...

The European dark honey bee (Apis mellifera mellifera) is today a rare subspecies across the former range of northern Europe where it has largely been replaced by hybrid bees such as the popular “Buckfast,” involving, but not limited to, the Italian subspecies (Apis mellifera ligustica). Here, we report the presence of native dark bees in advertise...

Resumen La polinización es un servicio ecosistémico de gran importancia para el mantenimiento de los bosques y la provisión de alimentos en el mundo. El estudio se realizó entre septiembre y noviembre del 2018, con los objetivos de evaluar la diversidad de abejas sin aguijón asociadas al camu camu (Myrciaria dubia) y del incremento en la formación...

Understanding interactions between individual animals and their resources is fundamental to ecology. Agent-Based Models (ABMs) offer an opportunity to study how individuals move given the spatial distribution and characteristics of their resources. When contrasted with empirical individual-resource network data, ABMs can be a powerful method to det...

For bees to reach isolated islands, they need to be able to cross large water barriers. However, functional traits such as nesting behavior, flight range, and body size can limit their dispersal. In this study, the bee faunas of seven different islands or island groups (Anholt, Canary Islands, Fiji Islands, Hawaiian Islands, Madeira, Malta, and Sri...

The study of mutualistic interaction networks has led to valuable insights into ecological and evolutionary processes. However, our understanding of network structure may depend upon the temporal scale at which we sample and analyze network data. To date, we lack a comprehensive assessment of the temporal scale‐dependence of network structure acros...

The bee-flower biological association is one of the most famous examples of insect-plant interactions, and it is axiomatic that these are of critical importance for sustaining thriving terrestrial ecosystems. Yet, the most familiar associations are often artificially managed agricultural ecosystems, reflecting an exceptionally narrow range of bee s...

Recent phylogenetic analysis of the family Apidae has applied the tribal name Coelioxoidini to the distinctive genus Coelioxoides Cresson, which has been thought to be related to Tetrapedia Klug. However, the nomenclatural status of such a family-group name has not yet been assessed. Herein, we determine that this family-group name is available and...

The Møn Biosphere Area with its magnificent nature also hosts a rich fauna of native bees. Møn was in the past a favorite entomological locality for insect collecting and unique historical specimens of bees are preserved in the entomological collection of the Zoological Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark. Between 1852 to 1975, 61 different species of be...

We describe and figure a distinctive new species of the bee genus Andinopanurgus Gonzalez and Engel (Andrenidae, Protandrenini) from Apurímac and Cusco in southern Peru. Andinopanurgus vargasllosai Gonzalez and Alvarado, n. sp., occurs at elevations above 4000 m in the Central Andes and is the second species of this genus in Peru. The new species p...

The bumblebees of the subgenus Alpinobombus of the genus Bombus are unusual among bees for specialising in many of the most northerly vegetated arctic habitats on Earth. Most named taxa in this group (37 available names from a total of 67 names) were described originally from differences in the colour patterns of the hair. Previous revisions have s...

A striking structural pattern of pollination networks is the presence of a few highly connected species which has implications for ecological and evolutionary processes that create and maintain diversity. To understand the structure and dynamics of pollination networks we need to know which mechanisms allow the emergence of highly connected species...

Since the publication of the latest update to the checklist of bees known from Denmark, the following four species have been added as new to the country: Andrena falsifica Perkins, 1915 (Andrenidae), A. nanula Nylander, 1848 (Andrenidae), Lasioglossum pauxillum (Schenck, 1853) (Halictidae) and Megachile alpicola Alfken, 1924 (Megachilidae). The Dan...

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) commits its 196 nation parties to conserve biological diversity, use its components sustainably, and share fairly and equitably the benefits from the utilization of genetic resources. The last of these objectives was further codified in the Convention's Nagoya Protocol (NP), which came into effect in 201...

Inter-annual turnover in community composition can affect the richness and functioning of ecological communities. If incoming and outgoing species do not interact with the same partners, ecological functions such as pollination may be disrupted. Here, we explore the extent to which turnover affects species’ roles – as defined based on their partici...

A new genus of stingless bees (Apinae: Meliponini) is described and figured from Indonesia (Sulawesi), known from a single species previously placed in Geniotrigona Moure. Based on recent phylogenetic studies, Trigona (Geniotrigona) incisa Sakagami and Inoue renders Geniotrigona polyphyletic and is more closely related to Lepidotrigona Moure. The s...

A new subgenus is established within the Indomalayan stingless bee genus Heterotri-gona Schwarz (Meliponini). Sahulotrigona Engel & Rasmussen, new subgenus, is distinguished from amongst other Heterotrigona, particularly the subgenus Platytrigona Moure, within which one of the two included species was previously placed. The subgenus presently inclu...

We provide comparative comments on the morphology and provenance of the primary types of the species in the stingless bee genus Nannotrigona Cockerell. We offer an illustrated key to workers of all presently known species and designate lectotypes for the following species to stabilize their names: N. dutrae (Friese), N. mellaria (Smith), N. punctat...