Poor nutrition and landscape changes are regularly cited as key factors causing the decline of wild and managed bee populations. However, what constitutes “poor nutrition” for bees currently is inadequately defined. Bees collect and eat pollen: it is their only solid food source and it provides a broad suite of required macro- and micronutrients. Bees are also generalist foragers and thus the different pollen types they collect and eat can be highly nutritionally variable. Therefore, characterizing the multidimensional nutrient content of different pollen types is needed to fully understand pollen as a nutritional resource. Unfortunately, the use of different analytical approaches to assess pollen nutrient content has complicated between-studies comparisons and blurred our understanding of pollen nutrient content. This dataset includes the raw data generated from each of our analyses, including pollen disruption and nutrient assays. We used our collective data to propose a unifying approach for analyzing pollen nutrient content. This will help researchers better study and understand the nutritional ecology – including foraging behavior, nutrient regulation, and health – of bees and other pollen feeders.

[Note: This dataset is superseded by Version 2, https://doi.org/10.15482/USDA.ADC/1521354 ] Pollinator refuges such as wildflower strips are planted on farms with the goals of mitigating wild pollinator declines and promoting crop pollination services. It is unclear, however, whether or how these goals are impacted by managed honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) hives on farms. We examined how wildflower strips and honey bee hives and/or their interaction influence wild bee communities and the fruit count of two pollinator-dependent crops across 21 farms in the Mid-Atlantic U.S.

US*Bombus* is a large dataset that represents the outcomes of the largest standardized survey of bee pollinators (*Hymenoptera*, *Apidae*, *Bombus*) on the planet. The motivation to collect live bumble bees across the US was to document the decline and conservation status of *Bombus affinis*, *B. occidentalis*, *B. pensylvanicus*, and *B. terricola*. This dataset documents a total of 17,796 adult occurrence records across 391 locations and 38 species of *Bombus*. The geospatial coverage of the dataset extends across 41 of the 50 US states and from 0 to 3500 m a.s.l. The temporal scale of the dataset represents systematic surveys that took place from 2007 to 2010. The dataset was developed using SQL server 2008 r2. For each specimen, the following information is generally provided: species name, sex, caste, temporal and geospatial details, Cartesian coordinates, data collector(s), and when available, host plants. This database has already proven useful for a variety of studies on bumble bee ecology and conservation. Considering the value of pollinators in agriculture and wild ecosystems, this large systematic collection of bumble bee occurrence records will likely prove useful in investigations into the effects of anthropogenic activities on pollinator community composition and conservation status.