Margarita M. López-Uribe

Pennsylvania State University | Penn State · Department of Entomology

In cleptoparasitic bees, host aggression and detection avoidance might be the main selective pressures shaping host-parasite interactions. However, the behavioral responses toward parasitism are unknown for most host species. In this study, we investigated the host-parasite interactions and behaviors of the cleptoparasitic bee Triepeolus remigatus...

Bees are essential pollinators for wild, ornamental, and agricultural plants, but human activities have disrupted their habitats, threatening their persistence. Although bees face numerous challenges in habitats heavily modified by human activities, certain species persist and thrive there. This review synthesizes recent literature on two types of...

Honey bee foraging is a complex behavior because it involves tens of thousands of organisms making decisions about where to collect pollen and nectar based on the quality of resources and the distance to flowers. Studying this aspect of their biology is possible through direct observations but the large number of individuals involved in this behavi...

Ecological disturbance can promote or reduce community biodiversity depending on its severity. Beekeeping activities represent a type of ecological disturbance when large numbers of honey bees are introduced to a landscape and interact with the local plant and pollinator community. In this study, we characterized the effect of immediate and long-te...

Insects perform essential roles within ecosystems and can be vulnerable to climate change because of their small body size and limited capacity to regulate body temperature. Several groups of insects, such as bees and flies, are important pollinators of wild and cultivated plants. However, aspects of their thermal biology remain poorly studied, whi...

The genus Bombus (bumble bees) includes approximately 265 species, many of which are in decline in North America and Europe. To estimate colony abundance of bumble bees in natural and agricultural habitats, sibship relationships are often reconstructed from genetic data with the assumption that colonies have 1 monandrous queen. However, some specie...

Background Damage from insect herbivores can elicit a wide range of plant responses, including reduced or compensatory growth, altered volatile profiles, or increased production of defence compounds. Specifically, herbivory can alter floral development as plants reallocate resources towards defence and regrowth functions. For pollinator-dependent s...

Bee monitoring, or widespread efforts to document bee community biodiversity, can involve data collection using lethal (specimen collections) or nonlethal methods (observations, photographs). Additionally, data can be collected by professional scientists or by volunteer participants from the general public. Collection-based methods presumably produ...

Herbivory is a major fitness pressure for plants and a key driver of crop losses in agroecosystems. Dense monocultures are expected to favor specialist herbivorous insects, particularly those who primarily consume crop species; yet, levels and types of herbivory are not uniform within regional cropping systems. It is essential to determine which lo...

Plant defenses are conserved among closely related species, but domestication can alter host genotypes through artificial selection with potential losses in host defenses. Therefore, both domestication and host phylogenetic structure may influence plant virus infection outcomes. Here, we examined the association of phylogeny and domestication with...

Climate change presents a major threat to species distribution and persistence. Understanding what abiotic or biotic factors influence the thermal tolerances of natural populations is critical to assessing their vulnerability under rapidly changing thermal regimes. This study evaluates how body mass, local climate, and pathogen intensity influence...

Description Colonies of the western honey bee, Apis mellifera L., are comprised of tens of thousands of genetically related individuals that can easily share and spread pathogens. Honey bee colonies exhibit variations in disease susceptibility that can translate into highly variable pathogen replication among individuals within a colony, between co...

Wild lupine (Lupinus perennis) is a perennial plant originally found primarily throughout the United States and Canada in oak savannas, which are considered an ecotone between prairie and forest. Because of primary habitat loss, this early successional plant is declining and now persists in managed edge habitats such as power line rights-of-way and...

Long-horned bees (Apidae, Eucerini) are found in different biomes worldwide and include some important crop pollinators. In the Western Hemisphere, Eucerini received extensive taxonomic study during the twentieth century, resulting in several revisions of its genera. In contrast, progress on eucerine phylogenetic research and the genus-level classi...

Honey bee colony management is critical to mitigating the negative effects of biotic and abiotic stressors. However, there is significant variation in the practices implemented by beekeepers, which results in varying management systems. This longitudinal study incorporated a systems approach to experimentally test the role of three representative b...

The expansion of agriculture is responsible for the mass conversion of biologically diverse natural environments into managed agroecosystems dominated by a handful of genetically homogeneous crop species. Agricultural ecosystems typically have very different abiotic and ecological conditions from those they replaced and create potential niches for...

Coloration is an important phenotypic trait for taxonomic studies and has been widely used for identifying insect species and populations. However, coloration can be a poor diagnostic character for insect species that exhibit high polymorphism in this trait, which can lead to over-splitting of taxonomic units. In orchid bees, color variation has be...

Bees are important pollinators and are essential for the reproduction of many plants in natural and agricultural ecosystems. However, bees can have adverse ecological effects when introduced to areas outside of their native geographic ranges. Dozens of non-native bee species are currently found in North America and have raised concerns about their...

Global pollinator declines threaten food production and natural ecosystems. The drivers of declines are complicated and driven by numerous factors such as pesticide use, loss of habitat, rising pathogens due to commercial bee keeping and climate change. Halting and reversing pollinator declines will require a multidisciplinary approach and internat...

Bumble bees are characterized by their thick setal pile that imparts aposematic color patterns often used for species-level identification. Like all bees, the single-celled setae of bumble bees are branched, an innovation thought important for pollen collection. To date no studies have quantified the types of setal morphologies and their distributi...

Species delimitation is a rich scientific field that often uses different sources of data to identify independently evolving lineages that might be recognized as species. Here, we use an integrative approach based on morphometrics, COI-barcoding, and phylogenomics using ultraconserved elements (UCEs) to investigate whether the orchid bee species Eu...

Species delimitation is a rich scientific field that often uses different sources of data to identify independently evolving lineages that might be recognized as species. Here, we use an integrative approach based on morphometrics, COI-barcoding, and phylogenomics using ultraconserved elements (UCEs) to investigate whether the orchid bee species Eu...

Climate warming is considered to be among the most serious of anthropogenic stresses to the environment, because it not only has direct effects on biodiversity, but it also exacerbates the harmful effects of other human‐mediated threats. The associated consequences are potentially severe, particularly in terms of threats to species preservation, as...

The squash bee Eucera (Peponapis) pruinosa is emerging as a model species to study how stressors impact solitary wild bees in North America. Here, we describe the prevalence of trypanosomes, microsporidians and mollicute bacteria in E. pruinosa and two other species, Bombus impatiens and Apis mellifera, that together comprise over 97% of the pollin...

Bumble bees (genus Bombus ) includes approximately 250 social species, many of which are in decline in North America and Europe. To estimate colony abundance of bumble bees in natural and agricultural habitats, sib-ship relationships are often reconstructed from genetic data with the assumption that colonies have one monogamous queen. However, some...

Wild bees form diverse communities that pollinate plants in both native and agricultural ecosystems making them both ecologically and economically important. The growing evidence of bee declines has sparked increased interest in monitoring bee community and population dynamics using standardized methods. Here, we studied the dynamics of bee biodive...

Solitary bees are often exposed to various pesticides applied for pest control on farmland while providing pollination services to food crops. Increasing evidence suggests that sublethal toxicity of agricultural pesticides affects solitary bees differently than the social bees used to determine regulatory thresholds like honey bees and bumblebees....

In the era of globalized science, it is increasingly important that undergraduate students are not only exposed to local research environments, but also have the opportunity to interact with a broader international research community. Despite the benefits of such experiences, international research programs are generally offered to undergraduates o...

Wild bees form diverse communities that pollinate plants in both native and agricultural ecosystems making them both ecologically and economically important. The growing evidence of bee declines has sparked increased interest in monitoring bee community and population dynamics using standardized methods. Here, we studied the dynamics of bee biodive...

Annual losses of honey bee colonies are high in the United States, with losses often attributed to the effects of the ectoparasitic mite, Varroa destructor, and its associated viruses (e.g., Deformed Wing Virus, DWV). In the spring, beekeepers rely on package bees to replace lost colonies. However, these packages often come with high levels of mite...

Although bee visitation rate to flowers is often used to assess both pollination services and bee abundance, the abundance of social species needs to be assessed by quantifying the number colonies instead of the number of foraging individuals. Because accurately quantifying the number of wild bee colonies can be difficult, the relationship of visit...

Managed and wild bee populations are in decline around the globe due to several biotic and abiotic stressors. Pathogenic viruses associated with the Western honey bee (Apis mellifera) have been identified as key contributors to reductions in the number of managed honey bee colonies, and are known to be transmitted to wild bee populations through sh...

Urban areas can serve as biodiversity refuges for pollinators because of the high diversity of available floral and nesting resources. However, it remains unclear what plant species commonly used for urban landscaping provide floral resources that pollinators actively use. Here, we integrate data from the pollen and species distribution models of t...

Bees comprise a large group of over 20 000 species that show a wide range of forms, habits, plant associations, and degree of social interactions. The steep decline in managed honey bee colonies in North America and Europe since the mid 2000s has precipitated a big investment on developing a better understanding of the diversity of life history tra...

Gynandromorphs are anomalous individuals that are genetically chimeric and express both male and female phenotypes. Here, we describe the first record of a mosaic gynandromorph of the squash bee Eucera (Peponapis) pruinosa (Say) from a single specimen collected from western Pennsylvania, United States of America (USA). We discuss the known developm...

Studies of the ecoimmunology of feral organisms can provide valuable insight into how host–pathogen dynamics change as organisms transition from human-managed conditions back into the wild. Honey bees (Apis mellifera Linnaeus) offer an ideal system to investigate these questions as colonies of these social insects often escape management and establ...

North America has more than 4000 bee species, yet we have little information on the health, distribution, and population trends of most of these species. In the United States, what information is available is distributed across multiple institutions, and efforts to track bee populations are largely uncoordinated on a national scale. An overarching...

In 2002, Pennsylvania enacted legislation mandating the adoption of an integrated pest management (IPM) plan for each school district, intermediate unit, and area vocational-technical school in the state, and a 72-hour notification and posting period prior to pesticide use in schools or on school grounds. In 2012, the Pennsylvania Department of Agr...

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Studying the pollen preferences of introduced bees allows us to investigate how species use host-plants when establishing in new environments. Osmia cornifrons is a solitary bee introduced into North America from East Asia for pollination of Rosaceae crops such as apples and cherries. We investigated whether O. cornifrons (i) more frequently collec...

Studying the pollen preferences of introduced bees allows us to investigate how species use host-plants when establishing in new environments. Osmia cornifrons is a solitary bee introduced into North America from East Asia for pollination of Rosaceae crops such as apples and cherries. We investigated whether O. cornifrons (i) more frequently collec...

Checklists provide information about the species found in a defined region and serve as baselines for detecting species range expansions, contractions, or introductions. Bees are a diverse and important group of insect pollinators. Although some bee populations are declining, these patterns are difficult to document and generalize due to a lack of...

Adopting an Integrated Pest and Pollinator Management strategy requires an evaluation of pesticide risk for pollinator species. For non-Apid species, however, the standardized ingestion assays are difficult to implement. This hinders the consideration of non-Apid species in farm management strategies and government regulatory processes. We describe...

Evidence for global bee population declines has catalyzed a rapidly evolving area of research that aims to identify the factors involved and to effectively assess the status of pollinator populations. The term pollinator health emerged in the literature through efforts to understand causes of bee decline and colony losses, but it lacks a formal def...

Adopting an Integrated Pest and Pollinator Management strategy requires an evaluation of pesticide risk for pollinator species. For non-Apid species, however, the standardized ingestion assays are difficult to implement. This hinders the consideration of non-Apid species in farm management strategies and government regulatory processes. We describe...

Evidence for global bee population declines has catalyzed a rapidly evolving area of research that aims to identify the causal factors and to effectively assess the status of pollinator populations. The term pollinator health emerged through efforts to understand causes of bee decline and colony losses, but it lacks a formal definition. In this rev...

This manual provides information and instruction for managing pests on school grounds using integrated pest management.

Plasmodium ovale accounts for a disproportionate number of travel-related malaria cases. This parasite is understudied since there is a reliance on clinical samples. We collected a P. ovale curtisi parasite isolate from a clinical case in western Thailand and performed RNA-seq analysis on the blood stage transcriptomes. Using both de novo assembly...

Evidence for global bee population declines has catalyzed a rapidly evolving area of research that aims to identify the factors involved and to effectively assess the status of pollinator populations. The term pollinator health emerged in the literature through efforts to understand causes of bee decline and colony losses, but it lacks a formal def...

Insects, like all animals, are exposed to diverse environmental microbes throughout their life cycle. Yet, we know little about variation in the microbial communities associated with the majority of wild, unmanaged insect species. Here, we use a 16S rRNA gene metabarcoding approach to characterize temporal and geographic variation in the gut bacter...

Context Bees are the most important pollinators of crops worldwide. For most bees, patches of semi-natural habitat within or adjacent to crops can provide important nesting and food resources. Despite this, land cover change is rapidly reducing the abundance of semi-natural habitat within agroecological landscapes, with potentially negative consequ...

Understanding population genetic structure is key to developing predictions about species susceptibility to environmental change, such as habitat fragmentation and climate change. It has been theorized that life‐history traits may constrain some species in their dispersal and lead to greater signatures of population genetic structure. In this study...

The European honey bee (Apis mellifera) is the most important managed species for agricultural pollination across the world [...]

Management by beekeepers is of utmost importance for the health and survival of honey bee colonies. Beekeeping management practices vary from low to high intervention regarding the use of chemicals, hive manipulations, and supplemental feeding of colonies. In this study, we use quantitative data from the Bee Informed Partnership’s national survey t...

Adopting an Integrated Pest and Pollinator Management strategy requires an evaluation of pesticide risk for pollinator species. For non-Apid species, however, the standardized ingestion assays are difficult to implement. This hinders the consideration of non-Apid species in farm management strategies and government regulatory processes. We describe...

The power of citizen science to contribute to both science and society is gaining increased recognition, particularly in physics and biology. Although there is a long history of public engagement in agriculture and food science, the term 'citizen science' has rarely been applied to these efforts. Similarly, in the emerging field of citizen science,...

Accurate taxonomic delimitation in ecological research is absolutely critical as studies that seek to evaluate levels of biodiversity and qualify human effects on the environment are rapidly undertaken. Coloration is a widely used morphological character for species identification through dichotomous keys. However, taxonomic identification based up...

Tens of thousands of insects are deposited in collections every year as a result of survey-based studies that aim to investigate ecological questions. DNA-based techniques can expand the utility of these collections to explore their demographic and evolutionary history, temporal changes in their abundance, and pathogen dynamics. Using museum collec...

Social insects live in dense groups with a high probability of disease transmission and have therefore faced strong pressures to develop defences against pathogens. For this reason, social insects have been hypothesized to invest in antimicrobial secretions as a mechanism of external immunity to prevent the spread of disease. However, empirical stu...