# Pollination Experiment



## hpm08161947 (May 16, 2009)

Out in the blue berry fields today, we ran into a group of NC State Univ. grad students doing a pollination study. They were trying to determine who pollinates better... Osmea, Bumble bees, or Apis. The farmer has been trying to establish Osmea and Bumble bees... naturally plus he uses our bees. They had previous bagged unripened flowers and were unbagging it and stand a grad student by the plant to keep count of who and what pollinated it. They were an interesting mix of students from the dept of Entomology and Agriculture. I was a bit surprised to see them manually counting pollination, but what do I know... guess someone has got to do it. Some of them were terribly sunburned... guess grad students don't like to dress like migrant workers. We left them our card and asked to find out how the results went. Kinda surprised this little experiment hasn't been done a mess of times before. I suppose in nature the bumble is natural pollinator of BB, but this is hardly natural... so I suspect the Apis will win. particularly given the paucity of Bumble I have seen around the place.


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## lupester (Mar 12, 2008)

Is their study really valid? Are they counting which pollinates blueberries better or which pollinates cut flowers better? As soon as you cut the flowers the nectar starts to dwindle. Maybe I am just a silly BBA and don't know much about science.


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

Maybe they are redoing a study that has already been done. There have been such studies done.


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## Omie (Nov 10, 2009)

lupester said:


> Is their study really valid? Are they counting which pollinates blueberries better or which pollinates cut flowers better? As soon as you cut the flowers the nectar starts to dwindle.


I got the impression that they 'bagged' the flowers, not cut them. Just placing bags over them to prevent pollination until the flower was about to open- then removing bag and watching for pollinators. Didn't see anything about cutting the flowers.


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## hpm08161947 (May 16, 2009)

Yea.. they were just placing bags around the flowers,, then removing them when ripe.


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