Abstract
Bees sustain key functions in natural ecosystems and agricultural landscapes, yet our understanding of their ecology is typically informed from studies concentrated on a few model taxa. To reveal how this may be biasing our understanding of bee responses and function in the environment we quantify global patterns of research attention across 69,682 bee-related publications to test whether research effort aligns with plant-pollinator network centrality, trait variation, public interest, and socio-economic context. Human managed bees take up most of the research effort; importantly this trend has been increasing over time. Plant–pollinator network centrality is unrelated to research effort; here we reveal genera with high centrality but low research attention as prime candidates for future study. Both pollinator management and sociality have an impact on research effort. Excluding Apis and Bombus (the most traditionally researched genera), managed bee genera are the focus of twice as many papers as wild genera, with the managed share rising over time. Our study reveals and quantifies persistent global research biases and highlights the need for monitoring, risk assessment, and policies that target neglected yet structurally central genera in plant-pollinator interaction networks.
Data availability
Code and derived, aggregated datasets are available at Zenodo: Nesbit, M. (2026). Mapping global bee research with traits and plant-pollinator interaction networks - code and data. Zenodo. DOI:(https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18680740). Licensed bibliographic corpora (e.g., Web of Science/SCOPUS) cannot be redistributed and are available from the original providers under their terms.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge Professor James Rosindell for his work on the OneZoom project and subsequent discussions. We also wish to acknowledge Scott Tytheridge and Dr. Lauren Cator for their frank and excellent discussions on writing the early drafts of the manuscript. We also wish to thank Chloe Coxshall for her contributions to methods discussions. Thank you to both reviewers for their excellent suggestions which helped improve the manuscript. Finally, thank you to the Graystock Group for their valuble feedback and discussion.
Funding
This work was funded by a Ph.D. Scholarship from NERC through the Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet Doctoral Training Partnership (SSCP DTP) and the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, administered by the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London.
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M.L.N. led the study, designed and implemented the analysis pipeline, curated datasets, and drafted the initial manuscript. C.M. advised on the trait analyses and co-wrote subsequent drafts. F.W. contributed to development of the popularity index, provided conceptual input, and commented on later drafts. M.S.B.P. assisted with assembly and validation of the hand-curated dataset. R.G., W.O.H.H., and D.G. provided conceptual support and substantive feedback on drafts. P.G. originated the initial ideas and supervised the study. All authors reviewed and approved the final manuscript.
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Nesbit, M.L., Montauban, C., Windram, F. et al. Mapping global bee research with traits and plant-pollinator interaction networks. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-41830-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-41830-7
