Wild bee nutritional ecology: predicting pollinator population dynamics, movement, and services from floral resources

- Pollination ecosystem services are shaped by floral food resource availability.
- Nutrition provides a mechanistic link between floral resource availability and bee population dynamic and energetic processes.
- Landscape and community context influences how bees access and compete for food resources.

Pollination services are inherently shaped by floral resource availability, through the mediation of pollinator population dynamics and the influence on energetically costly processes, such as foraging. Here, we review recent insights that have improved our mechanistic understanding of how floral resources shape bee populations and pollination services. Our scope includes advances in our understanding of how individual bees and their populations are shaped by nutrient availability; investigations into how contemporary floral resource landscapes influence foraging; and new insights into how these relationships are indirectly impacted by biotic and abiotic factors across communities and landscapes. Throughout our review, we take a mechanistic, multi-scalar approach that highlights the complexity of interactions between floral resources and bees, across space and time.