Seasonal variation in floral resource foraging conditions for pollinators in northwest Europe: a review of the data

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Categorisition of foraging favourability of months examined in papers obtained from literature review. For studies that reported binary indicators of foraging conditions, months were categorised as either ‘favourable’ or ‘unfavourable’ for foraging. For studies with continuous data (e.g. mean honeybee foraging distances), the months examined were ranked in order of foraging favourability and the top-raking half were categorised as ‘favourable’, and bottom-ranking ‘unfavourable’. Several studies reported multiple indicators of foraging favourability (references 5, 14, 15, 18; Table 1). For Garbuzov et al. (2020), honeybee guarding activity was used as the response variable in the analysis because the authors reported it as the best indicator of foraging conditions. In other studies, months that were categorised as both favourable and unfavourable via different methods in the same study were classed as inconclusive and excluded (Odoux et al., 2014; Requier et al., 2015; 2017: May; Danner et al., 2017: none; Rutschmann et al., 2023: March, May, August). We used this simple categorization because it could be carried out across all the studies and satisfied our aim of determining whether certain months or seasons are consistently identified as unfavourable for pollinator foraging.

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