Abstract
Simple SummaryBlueberry is a crop that is increasing globally, both in terms of yield and extent, mostly thanks to the recent introduction of North American blueberry in the temperate areas of Europe, Asia, and South America. As blueberry depends largely on insects for pollination, farmers in these expansion areas face the challenge of adapting this crop to unexpected pollinator species, whose traits and features may not entirely fit the pollination needs of the introduced crop. Here we study the abundance, the behaviour, and the response to environmental conditions of different managed and wild native pollinators of blueberry in northern Spain. Our findings suggest the dominant role of native wild bumblebees and managed honeybee as suppliers of pollination service. Honeybee and bumblebees differed in both when and where they occurred, in how they responded to environmental conditions, and in how they behaved as an effective pollinator. The role of bumblebees and honeybee as blueberry pollinators thus seems complementary and additive. These results encourage the preservation of populations of native wild bees in order to ensure the effective management of introduced blueberry crops.The entomophilous pollination niche (abundance, phenotypic traits, foraging behaviours and environmental tolerances of insect pollinators) helps to understand and better manage crop pollination. We apply this niche approach to assess how an entomophilous crop (blueberry, Vaccinium ashei) can be expanded into new territories (i.e., northern Spain) far from their original area of domestication (North America). Insect visits to blueberry flowers were monitored in a plantation on 12 different days, at 8 different times during day and covering various weather conditions. Abundance, visitation rate, pollen gathering behaviour, and frequency of inter-plant and inter-row movements were recorded. The pollinator assemblage was basically composed of one managed honeybee species (50.8% of visits) and three native bumblebee species (48.3%). There was a marked pattern of seasonal segregation throughout bloom, with bumblebees dominating the early bloom and honeybee the late bloom. Pollinators also segregated along gradients of daily temperature and relative humidity. Finally, the two pollinator types differed in foraging behaviour, with bumblebees having a visitation rate double that of honeybee, collecting pollen more frequently and changing plant and row more frequently. The spatio-temporal and functional complementarity between honeybee and bumblebees suggested here encourages the consideration of an integrated crop pollination strategy for blueberries, based on the concurrence of both wild and managed bees.
Highlights
The production of many crop plants around the world depends greatly on pollination by insects, including both managed and wild species [1,2,3]
Little is known about how introduced crops must necessarily rely on farmer input or may benefit from the pre-adapted action of native wild pollinators
We studied the foraging behaviour of honeybee and bumblebees in terms of four different functional parameters: frequency of pollen gathering, the number of flowers visited per minute, the frequency of inter-plant movements and the frequency of inter-row movements
Summary
The production of many crop plants around the world depends greatly on pollination by insects, including both managed (e.g., honeybee) and wild (e.g., bees, hoverflies, butterflies) species [1,2,3]. The loss of seminatural habitats in agricultural landscapes and the concomitant decline of wild pollinators of crops may compromise yields as managed honeybees alone cannot compensate for the lost effectiveness of wild pollinators [3,5] This is because of the positive effect of pollinator richness, which derives from the functional complementarity of the different insect species [6,7]. A pollination-niche approach seems necessary for estimating how entomophilous crops can be expanded into new territories far from their original areas of domestication [8] In this sense, little is known about how introduced crops must necessarily rely on farmer input (through managed bees) or may benefit from the pre-adapted action of native wild pollinators (see [9])
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