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Apidologie

pp 1–13 | Cite as

Colonizing the east and the west: distribution and niche properties of a dwarf Asian honey bee invading Africa, the Middle East, the Malay Peninsula, and Taiwan

  • Daniel P. SilvaEmail author
  • Ana Carollina F. Castro
  • Bruno Vilela
  • Xin Rui Ong
  • Jennifer C. Thomas
  • Abdulaziz S. Alqarni
  • Michael S. Engel
  • John S. Ascher
Original article
First Online:

Abstract

Species invasions are expected to increase continuously with undeniable impact upon native biodiversity, being an important process in relation to the decline of native pollinators. We used species distribution models and multivariate analyses to assess the climatic niche properties of the red dwarf honey bee, Apis florea Fabricius (Apidae: Apini), an open-nesting species native to southern Asia and parts of the Middle East, currently invading East Africa, Sundaic tropical Southeast Asia (Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore), and East Asia (Taiwan). The species’ niche was relatively conserved, with the climatic conditions in all its invaded range overlapped by those from its native one. Its potential distribution in Africa and the Indomalayan region is broad, with anthropogenic areas likely providing new habitats and dispersal corridors in areas that were formerly too arid or too heavily forested to allow its dispersal. Future studies to evaluate the potential impacts of A. florea in invaded ranges are encouraged.

Keywords

species distribution models macroecology invasion process Asia Africa 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

The authors thank three independent reviewers who provided significant suggestions that considerably improved a previous version of this study.

Author contribution

DPS and MSE conceived this research and designed the experiments; MSE, JSA, JCT, ASA, and MSE provided the data; DPS, ACFC, and BV analyzed the data; and DPS, ACFC, BV, JSA, JCT, ASA, XRO, and MSE wrote the paper.

Funding information

The International Scientific Partnership Program (ISPP) at King Saud University through ISPP #0083 supported parts of this project. Also, this study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brazil (CAPES), while the compilation of distributional records was supported in part by the National Research Foundation Singapore grant R-154-000-673-651.

Supplementary material

13592_2019_711_MOESM1_ESM.docx (22 kb)
ESM 1 (DOCX 21 kb)
13592_2019_711_MOESM2_ESM.xlsx (109 kb)
ESM 2 (XLSX 109 kb)

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Copyright information

© INRA, DIB and Springer-Verlag France SAS, part of Springer Nature 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.COBIMA Lab, Departamento de Ciências BiológicasInstituto Federal GoianoGoiásBrazil
  2. 2.Programa de Pós-Graduação em Biodiversidade AnimalInstituto de Ciências Biológicas Universidade Federal de Goiás, Campus IIGoiâniaBrazil
  3. 3.Instituto de BiologiaUniversidade Federal da BahiaSalvadorBrazil
  4. 4.Insect Diversity Lab, Department of Biological SciencesNational University of SingaporeSingaporeSingapore
  5. 5.Division of Entomology, Natural History MuseumUniversity of KansasLawrenceUSA
  6. 6.Department of Plant Protection, College of Food and Agriculture SciencesKing Saud UniversityRiyadhSaudi Arabia
  7. 7.Division of Entomology, Natural History Museum, and Department of Ecology & Evolutionary BiologyUniversity of KansasLawrenceUSA
  8. 8.Division of Invertebrate ZoologyAmerican Museum of Natural HistoryNew YorkUSA

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