Bumblebee queen mortality and behaviour along roads with varying traffic and road verges with contrasting flowering plant diversity

The aim of the project was to quantify whether linear infrastructure habitats (road verges and power-line corridors) support biodiversity by assessing the influence of the area of these habitats in the landscape, their contribution to landscape connectivity and population persistence. The linked data was collected by surveying bumblebee queens during the spring and late summer in 20 sites in Uppland, Sweden.

The sites were paired such that half of them had a high flowering plant diversity in the road verge and a gradient in traffic intensity from ~100 to ~6000 vehicles per day, and the other half had a similar gradient in traffic intensity but low flowering plant diversity in the road verge (i.e. regular grass dominated road verges). The surveyor walked a 2 km transect (1 km in each side of the road) and recorded all dead and alive bumblebee queens.