FLORAL VISITORS OF Mikania glomerata SPRENG. (ASTERACEAE) IN AN URBAN GARDEN

Abstract

Mikania glomerata Spreng. (Asteraceae) is a medicinal plant with bindweed habit, popularly named as “guaco”. The species has inflorescences with a big number of little capitulum and greenish-white flowers, which have nectar and pollen grains as food resource to the flower-visiting insects. Seeking to establish the importance of urban gardens to the management of the entomofauna in the city of Maringá, located in the Northern region of Paraná, we aimed to recognize the diversity of insects that visit the inflorescences of the guaco. The flower-visiting insects were caught in the Garden of the pollinators of the Interdisciplinary Dynamic Museum, located in the main campus of the State University of Maringá (MUDI/UEM), located in a urban area and where are cultivated dozens of other plant species related to the entomophily. In the first half of the month of October of 2019 there were spent nine hours of sapling effort, between 7:30am to 6:00pm, in the big vines of guaco at MUDI, where we actively collected the insects that interacted with the inflorescences. The diversity of the insects visiting the inflorescence of the guaco was represented by 31 species, belonging to five orders, highlighting Hymenoptera as the group with the highest species richness (13 species or 41,94%) and, within this order, Apis mellifera scutellata was the most common specie in the collections. Hemiptera was represented by seven species, Diptera by five, Coleoptra by four and Lepidoptera by two. Mikania glomerata showed important interaction with the insect community of the main campus of UEM and, because of that, should be included in the urban insects conservation programs.