North R&D, Israel
Question
Asked 5th Oct, 2016
How does honey bee foraging is advantageous to mustard plant?
Mustard is a self-pollinating crop and it also provides nectar and pollen resources to pollinators like the honey bee but in return what do bee gave to mustard ?
Most recent answer
See also the following interesting paper:
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All Answers (6)
Julius Kühn-Institut
Mustard probably benefits to the presence of pollinators (particularily honey bees) in a similar way than oilseed rape:
"The honeybee, Eristalis hoverflies and bumblebees (especially Bombus sensu stricto and B. lapidarius) were the best pollinators of winter oilseed rape based on the number of pollen grains they carry, visitation rates per flower and their relative abundance per field. Exclusion of pollinators resulted in a 27 % decrease in the number of seeds produced, and a 30 % decrease in seed weight per pod in winter crops, with comparable values from a spring oilseed rape field also."
See the link below:
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National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research Goa India.
Pradeep:
You would find this link useful:
Best
Syed
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North R&D, Israel
Even though the cultivated mustard is self pollinated, its spontaneous pollination (without pollinator help) is not efficient. The bee visiting the mustard flower enhances both self- and cross-pollination.
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National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research Goa India.
Kindly also have a look at this link wherein (Chapter 9) the importance of Bees are stressed for self-pollinating crop of Mustard:
Best
Syed
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Similar questions and discussions
Does anyone have advice on harvesting nectar from strawberry flowers?
Peter Orrell
Can anyone provide advice on harvesting nectar from strawberry flowers? The flowers have relatively low nectar content, and we have tried 5μl and 10μl microcapillary tubes, however this has been unsuccessful. Additionally, we have tried using a centrifuge to remove the nectar, but again this has been unsuccessful. The following paper has used microcapillary tubes previously http://www.ias.ac.in/jarch/jbiosci/17/41-44.pdf?origin=publication_detail , but does not contain much information as to the exact procedure used, and does not seem to work at all on our flowers. We need to measure both the quantity and sugar content of the nectar, so the rinsing/washing/filter paper techniques described in http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/103/3/533.full.pdf+html would not be appropriate as they does not allow quantity to be measured.
See the picture attached for an image of a strawberry flower.
Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!
Trapping strategy for ground nesting bees?
Chao-Dong(朝东) Zhu(朱)
Trapping strategy for ground nesting bees?
部分中文背景知识介绍:独栖蜜蜂巢穴与生物学研究,http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-536560-813417.html
In 2007, I was contacted for the pollination problems of the tree oil, Camellia oleifera Abel. This tree has been planted alone Yangtze River in very large area. It helps to prevent the water loss and keep soil in mountainous area. The oil quality has been studied and evaluated to be very high than those made from Brassicaceae. However, the fruit-sets have been quite low even after so many years cultivation. As this species blossoms in late autumn till early spring, there are quite low number of insect species in local fauna. Some scientists, including Prof. Yan-Ru WU thought about the pollination inefficiency. Previously, she found around 15 pollinator bees including Apis spp., with most species have their nests in soil.
So, I was encouraged to study nesting biology of some pollinator bees in Jiangxi and Hunan. Mr. Liang DING and Dr. Dunyuan HUANG stayed in the Yichun to observe the local pollinators. They did a very good job to experiment on many aspects of some bees by digging deep in soil. Basing on nesting biological studies, Dunyuan kept working on building artificial nests after he found a job in Ganzhou. He finally set up these nests as traps in soil and moved them to different places to increase the populations for farmers or for experimental purposes.
Currently, I prefer to use Malaise Traps, Nest Traps and Yellow Pan Traps to sample wild bees. However, many other solitary bees, especially those nesting in soil were probably neglected. Recently, I had a few chats with Dr. Raphael Didham, Dr. Douglas Chesters and Dr. Jeff Ollerton about this issue. It should be fantastic to experiment on artificial soil traps for wild bees.
So, I raise and divide the questions into two as below –
1. What most cost-effective trapping methods do you recommend for sampling wild bees?
2. What trapping strategy do you recommend for sampling ground nesting bees?
Thanks for your kind comments and suggestions.
Best,
cd
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