Assessing the pollination efficiency of different species of bees on buzz-pollinated plants of agricultural significance

Bees provide essential pollination services in both natural and agricultural systems. The recent and worrying decline in bee populations around the world has highlighted the importance of understanding the interaction of flowers and bees during pollination. Although many bees, including those used as supplemental pollinators, are generalist pollinators, not all bees can provide all pollination services. For example, honeybees are incapable of buzz pollination, a type of pollination that involves bees producing high frequency vibrations with their thoracic muscles to pollinate specialised flowers. There are more than 20,000 species of plants that require buzz pollination, including crops such as tomato, eggplant and kiwi. Yet, we know relatively little about the capacity of different species of bees to pollinate these specialised flowers.
This project will investigate the capacity of wild and captive pollinators (bumblebees and honeybees) to pollinate natural and agricultural systems. We will investigate whether different species of bumblebees differ in the capacity to buzz pollinate flowers, and whether the presence of non-buzz-pollinators such as Apis mellifera, hinder or benefit pollination of wild and crop species.
The project brings together experts in pollination (Prof. Willmer), plant reproduction and buzz pollination (D. Vallejo-Marin), native bees and plant reproduction (Prof. Quezada Euan. Field trials will be conducted in Scotland and in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico with our local collaborators. We will use an experimental approach to study pollination services involving both laboratory experiments of bee behaviour, and field trials of wild and crop species. During fieldwork in Mexico, we will conduct community-level surveys of wild bees in natural plant communities and agricultural fields. As agricultural systems, we will focus on tomato and Habanero chilli pepper , both of which are important commercial crops in either national or global markets. Our work will assess the effect of pollinator behaviour and diversity on the productivity of these crops.