
These topics, though uncommon in much of the current published literature, are important for understanding how urban pollinating bees survive. However, more specific information about how bees are able to be successful in cities, as have been studied in birds and mammals, has not been prioritized in any review thus far. Recent reviews of these articles reveal global patterns of high bee richness in cities, and the impact of urban landscape characteristics on bee populations.

Bee species have high diversity and abundance in cities, which has been empirically supported in numerous studies assessing community composition. One group of organisms with a large urban presence are bees. Numerous animal species can survive in human-modified habitats, but often display behavioral, morphological, physiological or genetic plasticity compared to non-urban conspecifics.

using pollen metabarcoding) could be helpful for identifying key plant taxa and traits for bee survival and for improving strategies to develop bee‐friendly cities. Identifying larval floral preferences (e.g. For high to intermediate levels of feeding specialization, we found considerable consistency in the preferred plant families or genera across the studied cities, which could be generalized to other cities where these bees occur. Satisfying larval dietary requirements is critical to preserving and enhancing wild bee distributions within urban gradients.

Species distribution modelling indicated that wild bee distribution ranges inside urban ecosystems ultimately depend on their degree of specialization, and that broader diets result in less sensitivity to urban intensity. communis, with a switch from a herbaceous pollen diet to a tree pollen diet with increasing urban intensity. Furthermore, we detected important diet variation in H. bicornis), or even strict specialization on widely available urban pollen hosts (i.e. communis), but also intermediate generalism, with some degree of diet conservatism at the plant family or genus level (i.e. Our results demonstrate that urban wild bees display different successful strategies to exploit existing urban floral resources: not only broad generalism (i.e. Specifically, using trap‐nests and pollen metabarcoding techniques, we characterized the species’ larval diet, assessed diet consistency across cities, and modelled the distribution of wild bees using species distribution models (SDMs). Chelostoma florisomne, Osmia bicornis, Osmia cornuta and Hylaeus communis) along urban intensity gradients in five European cities (Antwerp, Paris, Poznan, Tartu and Zurich) using two complementary analyses.

We investigated the larval diet and distribution patterns of four solitary wild bee species with different diet specialization (i.e. A better understanding of the urban bee diet, particularly at the larval stage, is necessary to understand biotic interactions and feeding behaviour in urban ecosystems, and to promote bees by improving the management of urban floral resources. Urban ecosystems can sustain populations of wild bees, partly because of their rich native and exotic floral resources.
