Springer Verlag, Apidologie, 1(44), p. 64-74
DOI: 10.1007/s13592-012-0155-8
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In tropical dry and hot forests, flower-visiting bees are able to forage only during the few hours a day with mild temperatures, but they may chose more freely among the plant species to be visited. Therefore, we tested the hypothesis that the overlap in temporal niches should be higher than the overlap in trophic niches among these bees. Between pairs of species (Schoener index), the overlap in trophic niches varied from 0.007 to 0.745, whereas the temporal overlap varied from 0.062 to 0.865. In general, the trophic overlap was low, with 79 % of the species pairs scoring below 30 %, and the temporal overlap varied from moderate to high. At the community level, the observed overlap in trophic niches was higher than expected by chance, both for diet and foraging time. The network analysis confirmed at the community level that bees separate more strongly their trophic (E = 0.82) than their temporal niches (E = 0.50).