Research Article Busy Bees: Variation in Insect Flower-Visiting Rates across Multiple Plant Species Margaret J. Couvillon, 1 Chandra M. Walter, 1 Eluned M. Blows, 1 Tomer J. Czaczkes, 1,2 Karin L. Alton, 1 and Francis L. W. Ratnieks 1 1 Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects (LASI), School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QG, UK 2 Biologie I, Universit¨ at Regensburg, 93053 Regensburg, Germany Correspondence should be addressed to Margaret J. Couvillon; maggiejanec@gmail.com Received 12 December 2014; Revised 18 May 2015; Accepted 26 May 2015 Academic Editor: Bertrand Schatz Copyright © 2015 Margaret J. Couvillon et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We quantifed insect visitation rates by counting how many fowers/inforescences were probed per unit time for fve plant species (four native and one garden: California lilac, bramble, ragwort, wild marjoram, and ivy) growing in Sussex, United Kingdom, by following individual insects ( = 2987) from nine functional groups (honey bees (Apis mellifera), bumble bees (Bombus spp.), hoverfies, fies, butterfies, beetles, wasps, non-Apidae bees, and moths). Additionally, we made a census of the insect diversity on the studied plant species. Overall we found that insect groups difered greatly in their rate of fower visits ( < 2.2 -16 ), with bumble bees and honey bees visiting signifcantly more fowers per time (11.5 and 9.2 fowers/minute, resp.) than the other insect groups. Additionally, we report on a within-group diference in the non-Apidae bees, where the genus Osmia, which is ofen suggested as an alternative to honey bees as a managed pollinator, was very speedy (13.4 fowers/minute) compared to the other non-Apidae bees (4.3 fowers/minute). Our census showed that the plants attracted a range of insects, with the honey bee as the most abundant visitor (34%). Terefore, rate diferences cannot be explained by particular specializations. Lastly, we discuss potential implications of our conclusions for pollination. 1. Introduction Many factors, both plant- and insect-centered, can afect pollination. From the plant perspective, these may include quality, quantity, and temporal/spatial variation of pollen production and the receptivity of the stigma [1–13]. Because insect pollination is a generally indirect efect of foraging behavior (with some well-known exceptions), plants have also evolved adaptations that infuence pollinating insects, such as providing rewards, developing nectar guides to help direct pollinator movement, and placing the rewards so that the pollinator must contact the stamens or stigma [14]. In addition, pollinating insects themselves also have various attributes that afect their efcacy as pollinators, such as how much pollen they typically collect on their bodies [15, 16] and their degree of fower constancy [17]. Another important factor contributing to pollination is the movement of pollinators between fowers, where a higher visitation rate should result in a greater amount of pollination, if all else is equal. Previously, fower visitation rate has been mostly investi- gated from the plant perspective, where researchers quantify visits by diferent pollinators to a particular plant [2, 18– 26]. However, any variation in visitation rate among difer- ent pollinators on a particular plant species may refect a specialization or advantage of that particular pollinator-plant pair, such as the profciency of hummingbirds on larkspur (compared to bumble bees) or bumble bees on lavender (compared to honey bees [19, 27]). What is less known is whether there are general, broadly consistent diferences in the visitation rate between insect functional groups. In other words, we wished to know more about fower visitation rates from the perspective of the insect across diferent fowering plants. Hindawi Publishing Corporation Psyche Volume 2015, Article ID 134630, 7 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/134630