Honeybee pollination can double a coffee crop鈥檚 yield, new research shows.
The plants are primarily self-pollinating. But research by David Roubik at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama shows bee pollination is much more important than farmers thought.
Roubik studied plantations of the shrub Coffea arabica, which produces 70 per cent of the world鈥檚 coffee, in western Panama. Non-native African honeybees were introduced in the area in 1985.
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Roubik covered some coffee plant branches with netting, and compared the yield of these plants to those regularly visited by the bees. He found that bees consistently increased coffee yields by around 36 percent. In some cases they boosted production by more than 50 percent.
Genetic diversity
Honeybees are found throughout the main coffee-growing regions of Africa and South America. Bee pollination accounts for 鈥渙ne third of the world coffee production, if other plants are similar to the ones I鈥檝e been studying,鈥� Roubik told 快猫短视频:
He believes bees improve coffee yield by increasing the amount of pollen placed on the stigma of each plant and increasing the genetic diversity of coffee crops.
UN data on coffee yields worldwide, and on the introduction or elimination of honeybees from different regions, backs his conclusions, Roubik says.
Taylor Ricketts of Stanford University鈥檚 Center for Conservation Biology says: 鈥淭o me perhaps the best approach is to understand what roles native bees play in local agriculture and try to conserve a diversity of them in the landscape, so that agriculture is not dependent on a single species of introduced bee, or on a managed pollinator industry.鈥�