Different handling times, shared diel rhythms: spatial variation in flower-visitor behavior in apple orchards

<p dir="ltr">Dataset associated with the study “Different handling times, shared diel rhythms: spatial variation in flower-visitor behavior in apple orchards”.</p><p dir="ltr">This dataset contains flower-handling-time observations collected from flower visitors in nine apple orchards in the Maule Region of central Chile over two sampling years. Researchers observed flower visitors directly on apple blossoms between 09:00 and 17:00 along standardized within-orchard transects with seven sampling stations at 0, 10, 20, 40, 80, 160, and 320 m from the orchard edge.</p><p dir="ltr">Flower handling time was defined as the time, in seconds, that a visitor spent handling or foraging on a flower, measured from initial physical contact with the flower until departure.

The dataset includes taxonomic information on flower visitors together with temporal, spatial, environmental, observer, orchard, and sampling-year information. We reconstructed sampling-bout identity from the original field-record sequence using year, orchard, observer, station, and the exact recorded bout start time, allowing us to identify repeated observations under the same immediate sampling conditions.</p><p dir="ltr">The dataset was used to examine (i) differences among flower-visitor groups in the magnitude and diel organization of flower-handling behavior, (ii) temporal behavioral overlap and differentiation among visitor groups based on normalized model-predicted diel trajectories, and (iii) spatial variation in diel behavioral organization along within-orchard edge-to-interior and native-forest-distance gradients.</p><p dir="ltr">The complete dataset contains 2,237 flower-handling observations representing 76 flower-visitor species.