Simone Flaminio

Council for Agricultural Research and Agricultural Economy Analysis | CREA · Honey bee and Silkworm Research Unit (CRA-API) (Bologna) (CRA-API)

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...

At a time when nature conservation has become essential to ensure the long-term sustainability of our environment, it is widely acknowledged that conservation actions must be implemented within a solid taxonomic framework. In preparation for the upcoming update of the IUCN Red List, we here update the European checklist of the wild bees (sensu the...

An essential prerequisite to safeguard pollinator species is characterisation of the multifaceted diversity of crop pollinators and identification of the drivers of pollinator community changes across biogeographical gradients. The extent to which intensive agriculture is associated with the homogenisation of biological communities at large spatial...

In recent decades, hundreds of secondary metabolites have been found in floral nectar and many studies have demonstrated that they can play various roles in modulating the behaviour of floral visitors. However, temporal variations in nectar chemistry over extended flowering seasons have never been substantiated. Moreover, the effects of nectar chem...

With its diverse range of climates and landscapes, the Middle East offers a remarkable area for the study of bee taxonomy and biogeography. In this work, a new species of pantaloon bee (Dasypoda delectabilis Ghisbain & Michez sp. nov.) is described from a single male collected in southeastern Iran. Although the new species shows affinities with the...

Anthropogenic drivers of bumblebee population decline are well-established, particularly in Europe and North America. Agriculturalizsation is associated with a loss of nesting sites, habitat fragmentation, agrochemical toxicity and nutritional stress; climate change is affecting population distribution, phenology, and voltinism, among other traits....

Using RADSeq approaches, we uncovered potential loci associated with 5 environmental variables (land cover and climate) in two European bumblebee species (Bombus pascuorum and B. lapidarius).

In recent years molecular techniques have been used on museum material as integrative support for classic taxonomy. This cumulative systematics approach is especially for rare or extinct specimens, and genetic analysis may be useful to discern information that is not possible to glean from live materials or morphology. To date, the extraction of DN...

Diseases contribute to the decline of pollinator populations, which may be aggravated by the interspecific transmission of honey bee pests and pathogens. Flowers increase the risk of transmission, as they expose the pollinators to infections during the foraging activity. In this study, both the prevalence and abundance of 21 honey bee pathogens (11...

Complex biotic networks of invaders and their new environments pose immense challenges for researchers aiming to predict current and future occupancy of introduced species. This might be especially true for invasive bees, as they enter novel trophic interactions. Little attention has been paid to solitary, invasive wild bees, despite their increasi...

The giant resin bee, Megachile sculpturalis (Megachilidae), is a species alien to Europe that easily adopts bee hotels in city gardens. In Italy, we are carrying out a monitoring project at CREA bee hotel. Starting in 2016, we monitored emergence and defined nest structure and pollen; estimated the number of nests completed by each female, and reco...

A new species of Trachusa Panzer 1804 is described from Vietnam: Trachusa vietnamensis sp. nov. that is assigned to subgenus Paraanthidium Friese 1898 and is the first Trachusa species found in Vietnam. The species is described from a single female specimen, so the male remains undescribed. A morphological description and a series of pictures are g...

Animal species success is linked to a combination of suitable ecological conditions coupled with behavioural plasticity. The latter is certainly a key element especially for the spread of alien species. Megachile sculpturalis is an East-Asian solitary bee accidentally introduced in France that quickly spread in many European countries. While numero...

There is increasing interest in evaluating biodiversity to preserve ecosystem services. Researchers can sustain policymakers by providing tools, such as indexes and indicators, that need constant implementation to become accepted standards. Implementation may vary from re-evaluation of existing indicators to introduction of new ones based on emergi...

Bees play a key role in natural and agro-ecosystems and their diversity is worldwide threatened by anthropogenic causes. Despite this, there is little awareness of the existence of the numerous species of wild bees, and the common name “bee” is very often exclusively associated with Apis mellifera. Our aim was to create a citizen science project in...

In Sardinia, the second largest Mediterranean island, 316 species of bees are known. Here, for the first time, the following 20 taxa are reported: Colletes cunicularius (Linnaeus, 1761), and C. eous Morice, 1904 (Colletidae); Andrena humilis Imhoff, 1832, A. granulosa Pérez, 1902, A. cineraria (Linnaeus, 1758), A. pallitarsis Pérez, 1903, A. rugulo...

The pollination ecology in agroecosystems tackles a landscape in which plants and pollinators need to adjust, or be adjusted, to human intervention. A valid, widely applied approach is to regard pollination as a link between specific plants and their pollinators. However, recent evidence has added landscape features for a wider ecological perspecti...

Beewatching è un progetto nato nella primavera del 2018 da una collaborazione tra alcuni entomologi del CREA (Consiglio per la ricerca in agricoltura e l’analisi dell’economia agraria) e alcuni botanici del BIGEA (Dipartimento discienze biologiche, geologiche e ambientali) dell’Università di Bologna. Il progetto nasce dalla passione per le api selv...

tacking the variables to be included in an indicator on pollinators, step by step from existing ones to missing information

Megachile disjunctiformis Cockerell 1911 (Hymenoptera Megachilidae) is recorded for the first time in Europe. After previous observations in 2011 and 2016 near Bologna, Italy, three specimens (one female and two males) were captured in three different locations of the Bologna area in 2017 and identified. The species is known from China, Japan, Taiw...