Pollinator Effectiveness
Crop Production - WP 4 | Wessex BESS
The team have been joined by Ben Phillips, who is doing an MRes as part of Juliet Osborne’s research group, and has been working hard in the lab investigating pollinator community effectiveness. Ben has been looking at oilseed rape stigmas to count the pollen grains delivered by a single visit of an oilseed rape pollinator, which were collected in 2014 and 2015. Single visit tests were carried out by finding a freshly opened flower and presenting it to a pollinator. Quite a few insects are found with oilseed rape pollen on as you can see from the picture of a solitary bee and a bibionid fly (below), (some bibionids are also known as St Mark’s flies). There are definitely interesting differences between species! So far solitary bees seem to be out performing honey bees in terms of pollen delivery but we have a very small sample size which Ben is planning on increasing this year.
From left to right:
- Bibionid fly with some oilseed rape pollen © Ros Shaw
- Oilseed rape pollen grains under x40 magnification, coloured pink by fucshin dye © Ben Phillips
- Andrena cineraria covered in oilseed rape pollen © Ros Shaw
We also have data on the number and diversity of natural enemies of oilseed rape crop pests which is starting to come together – we have analysed 9 suction samples from each of our 32 fields (spread out over 2 years) and have two more samples to complete before we have done the same number of pitfall traps for ground based predatory invertebrates. We will be analysing this in relation to the amount and diversity of grassland near to the field.
