Landscape structure affects the sunflower visiting frequency of insect pollinators

Mass-flowering crop monocultures, like sunflower, cannot harbour a permanent pollinator community. Their pollination is best secured if both managed honey bees and wild pollinators are present in the agricultural landscape. Semi-natural habitats are known to be the main foraging and nesting areas of wild pollinators, thus benefiting their populations, whereas crops flowering simultaneously may competitively dilute pollinator densities. In our study we asked how landscape structure affects major pollinator groups’ visiting frequency on 36 focal sunflower fields, hypothesising that herbaceous semi-natural (hSNH) and sunflower patches in the landscape neighbourhood will have a scale-dependent effect. We found that an increasing area and/or dispersion of hSNH areas enhanced the visitation of all pollinator groups. These positive effects were scale-dependent and corresponded well with the foraging ranges of the observed bee pollinators. In contrast, an increasing edge density of neighbouring sunflower fields resulted in considerably lower visiting frequencies of wild bees. Our results clearly indicate that the pollination of sunflower is dependent on the composition and configuration of the agricultural landscape. We conclude that an optimization of the pollination can be achieved if sufficient amount of hSNH areas with good dispersion are provided and mass flowering crops do not over-dominate the agricultural landscape.