Flower constancy
An individual bee was categorized as flower constant if the pollen
pellet brought back to the hive contained pollen grains from a single
morphotype or family. We calculated the proportion of foragers that were
flower constant each day for a bee species, time period, and site.
Linear mixed models (proc mixed in SAS v. 9.4) were used to determine
the impact of bee species, time period, site, and their two-way
interactions on the proportion of foragers that were flower constant.
Day was the replicate in the model and bee species, period, site, and
the two-way interactions were fixed effects. The three-way interaction
term, site*period*species, was included as a random effect in the model,
and provided the error term against which each fixed effect was tested.
For each statistically significant factor, multiple means comparisons
were performed to determine differences among levels of each factor.