The term oligolecty is used in

pollination Pollination is the transfer of pollen from an anther of a plant to the stigma of a plant, later enabling fertilisation and the production of seeds, most often by an animal or by wind. Pollinating agents can be animals such as insects, birds, a ...

ecology to refer to bees that exhibit a narrow, specialized preference for pollen sources, typically to a single family or

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial nom ...

of flowering plants. The preference may occasionally extend broadly to multiple genera within a single plant family, or be as narrow as a single plant species. When the choice is very narrow, the term ''monolecty'' is sometimes used, originally meaning a single plant species but recently broadened to include examples where the host plants are related members of a single genus. The opposite term is '' polylectic'' and refers to species that collect pollen from a wide range of species. The most familiar example of a polylectic species is the domestic

honey bee A honey bee (also spelled honeybee) is a eusocial flying insect within the genus ''Apis'' of the bee clade, all native to Afro-Eurasia. After bees spread naturally throughout Africa and Eurasia, humans became responsible for the current cosm ...

. Oligolectic pollinators are often called oligoleges or simply specialist pollinators, and this behavior is especially common in the bee families

Andrenidae The Andrenidae (commonly known as mining bees) are a large, nearly cosmopolitan family of solitary, ground-nesting bees. Most of the family's diversity is located in temperate or arid areas (warm temperate xeric). It includes some enormous gener ...

and

Halictidae Halictidae is the second-largest family of bees (clade Anthophila) with nearly 4,500 species. Halictid species are an extremely diverse group that can vary greatly in appearance. These bees occur all over the world and are found on every continen ...

, though there are thousands of species in hundreds of genera, in essentially all known bee families; in certain areas of the world, such as deserts, oligoleges may represent half or more of all the resident bee species.Michener, C.D. (2007) ''The Bees of the World'', 2nd Edition, Johns Hopkins University Press; pp. 19-21. Attempts have been made to determine whether a narrow host preference is due to an inability of the bee

larva A larva (; plural larvae ) is a distinct juvenile form many animals undergo before metamorphosis into adults. Animals with indirect development such as insects, amphibians, or cnidarians typically have a larval phase of their life cycle. ...

e to digest and develop on a variety of pollen types, or a limitation of the adult bee's learning and perception (i.e., they simply do not recognize other flowers as potential food sources), and most of the available evidence suggests the latter. However, a few plants whose pollen contains toxic substances (e.g., ''

Toxicoscordion ''Toxicoscordion'' is a genus of flowering plants in the family Melanthiaceae, tribe Melanthieae, first described as a genus in 1903. The genus is mainly distributed in the midwestern United States and western North America, with some species i ...

'' and related genera in the

Melanthieae Melanthieae is a tribe of flowering plants within the family Melanthiaceae. Molecular phylogenetic studies in the 21st century have resulted in a large-scale reassignment of many of its species to different genera; in particular the genus '' Zi ...

) are visited by oligolectic bees, and these may fall into the former category. The evidence from large-scale phylogenetic analyses of bee evolution suggests that, for most groups of bees, oligolecty is the ancestral condition and polylectic lineages arose from among those ancestral specialists. There are some cases where oligoleges collect their host plant's pollen as larval food but, for various reasons, rarely or never actually pollinate the flowers. A well-studied example is the relationship between the yellow passionflower (''Passiflora lutea'') and the passionflower bee (''Anthemurgus passiflorae'') in

Texas Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...

References

{{Wiktionary Ecology Pollination

Further reading

References