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Last Updated: Apr 16, 2008 - 5:52:06 PM |
Hardworking
blue orchard bees can be coaxed out of their snug winter cocoons just
in time to pollinate the year's earliest and best blossoms, thanks to a
newly designed box for these slumbering pollinators.
Bee experts
with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Pollinating Insects
Biology, Management and Systematics Research Unit in Logan, Utah,
created the box to help growers and beekeepers ensure that blue orchard
bees (Osmia lignaria) or other wild bees are ready to help America's
harried honey bees (Apis mellifera) pollinate fruit or nut trees--or
other crops--as soon as they begin to flower.
Synchronizing bees
and blooms is tricky, according to ARS research entomologist Theresa L.
Pitts-Singer at Logan. For example, almond trees may burst into bloom
when still-wintering bees aren't yet ready to pollinate them.
Pitts-Singer,
Logan technician Glen E. Trostle, and former Logan entomologists
William P. Kemp, now with ARS in North Dakota, and Jordi Bosch, now in
Spain, designed and tested the housing unit, called a "bee warming and
emergence box." ARS is seeking a patent.
Tests in a California
almond orchard and Utah apple orchard--with about 450 female blue
orchard bees in each--showed that approximately 50 percent of the bees
sheltered in the new boxes flew outdoors by the fourth day of the test.
That was two days earlier in California and seven days earlier in Utah
than bees emerging from traditional, unheated wood blocks.
For
the experiment, prototype units--made of polycarbonate and polystyrene
foam, and measuring 16 by 10 by 13 inches--were slipped inside wood
shelters in the orchards. Each prototype included a heating unit,
thermostat and clear tube for bees to use as an exit. Some daylight
comes into the box through the clear tube, so that bees can find their
way out.
Flexible bristles lining the tube allow bees out, but
not back in. That's a plus, because it encourages the bees to make new,
clean nests in wood blocks nearby.
ARS is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief scientific research agency.
______________________________
ARS News Service
Agricultural Research Service, USDA
Marcia Wood, (301) 504-1662, marcia.wood@ars.usda.gov
January 22, 2008
--View this report online, plus photos and related stories, at www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr
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© 2004-2008 by foodconsumer.org unless otherwise specified
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