First Project Update, Oct 2023

@harshithjv I believe Pseuderanthemum is mentioned individually under each bee. And there are many multiples like that. We have to read the table per bee as it's a full compilation. Am I missing something?

most interesting data, thank you for doing this project. Key take out for me - reinforces my believe in Calotropis as an important plant, it needs more attention, poor thing, it is considered weed and people dont like it in their gardens and on other hand it has deep religious cues. Species with less 5 nectar plant are vulnerable ? May also low data points.

@sagarika_chen It's just a starting, still long way to go. This data is not a proper representative and we just wish to show project progress to fellow participants/community naturalists. The reason for highest number of Calotropis interactions compared to other plants is because they're easy to identifiable (atleast to me, I added many numbers of Calotropis observations), so you can see that the data is biased (for now, we may improvise this in the upcoming days), still long list of different flower interactions left to be added. We have lack of active and reliable plant identifiers and also lack of active participants.

@sagarika_chen Sagarika, good points and questions there. While this data, collected over the course of a year, may still not be very representative, it is still significant. And I believe Calotropis, and perhaps other plants, may have some unique relationship with Bees. A quick look up showed some studies in different parts of the world where Calotropis were extensively pollinated by Bees, particularly Xylocopa. Incidentally, Xylocopa happen to be some of the larger bees and so, perhaps relatively easier to photograph (and so, that's a bias in itself?), and Xylocopa have been the most commonly observed group of bees too. I agree that Calotropis may be easier to identify because of the familiarity in the cultural context, but Lantana or Millettia or others may also be relatively well-known or easy to ID?

While the data from the Lepidoptera Nectar project is still very new, Calotropis was not in the top nectaring plants out of some 1700 initial observations. In fact, Calotropis had only one single observation. Lantana was most common there, but not here. We have to wait to see where that data points us eventually, but there may be some plant species that prefer bees for pollination (a documented fact, right?).
These projects should get better with time and more observations and from different regions and seasons.

@azhagu @johnascher @bdagley @susanna_h and others would know better.
@siddarthmachado @shiwalee @chitrashanker @sayeegirdhari would also have notes to add to this.

Gaurav, yes, 93 was the total number of observations. And you're right about 12 unique bees having been seeing on Calotropis. Also, the hard work was all Azhagu's, I just drew some plots on Excel. @gs5

Great effort and collaboration from everyone!
Sorry, I dont know enough about plant-insect interaction, so I can't comment.