The conservation of flower-visiting insects is a necessary and worthwhile endeavor given their critical role in the pollination of wildflowers and crops. A lack of flowers is often cited as one of the reasons for declines of important flower-visiting taxa such as bees, so conservation and restoration efforts often revolve around the planting of native wildflowers. Given the wide variety of native wildflowers available to choose from and the expense of sourcing local seed, selecting the most preferred (i.e., the most widely visited) flowers is of the utmost importance.
I conducted the potted plant trials in two adjacent natural regions (Grassland and Parkland) and found that insect-flower preferences changed between them, likely due to the differences in the insect communities in each natural region. However, flower abundance in the original Grassland dataset predicted flower visitation better than any metric in both regions. Thus, abundant flowers were preferred by flower-visiting insects, but not because they were abundant, and the effect of neutral processes on flower-visitor data may be overestimated.
Overall, my thesis demonstrates that habitat type (through the comparison of natural regions and field border types respectively) matters more than the quantity of floral resources in shaping insect-flower visitation and insect communities. Flower-visiting insect conservation should focus on diversifying resources, even on a relatively small scale, to conserve the broadest number of species possible. Finally, I also demonstrated the prevalence and likely importance to
ecosystem services of hoverflies in agricultural areas in central Alberta.