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NEWS RELEASES - 2007
Keeping the Workers Happy
(Guelph, ON – July 3, 2007) It’s long been known that happy employees are
critical to any company’s success. A research project at the University of
Guelph has discovered that this same concept can also be applied to bees working
as pollinators in the Ontario greenhouse vegetable industry.
The greenhouse industry uses bees to pollinate both tomatoes and sweet peppers.
Successful pollination is critical to producing vegetables of good quality and
good size.
It used to be that farmers pollinated their plants by hand. Thousands of flowers
were vibrated daily using an electric or battery-operated vibrator. This was
both time consuming and labour intensive. It would take two people approximately
3 hours to pollinate just one acre of greenhouse. In 1987, farmers began using
bumblebees as pollinators with great success. By 1989, over 90 per cent of all
greenhouse tomato operations were home to bumblebee hives.
Over the past three years however, greenhouse vegetable growers have begun
having problems with consistent pollination. Bees are escaping, dying, and just
simply not pollinating the plants, and the causes are unknown at this time. Some
farmers have tried to increase the number of hives from an average of two per
acre to over ten, with no improvement. A decline in pollination efficiency means
a decline in crop yield and quality.
The potential financial impact of a pollination crisis is believed to be in the
millions of dollars, so the Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers are taking
action by supporting a research project spearheaded by Dr. Peter Kevan, an
environmental biologist from the University of Guelph, to look at the problem
and determine the underlying causes. With funding and support from the
University of Guelph, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), the Ontario
Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA), the Horticultural
Research Institute of Ontario (HRIO), the University of Western Ontario, and the
Canada-Ontario Research and Development (CORD) Program.
Over the next year Kevan hopes to learn more about what the bees actually need
in terms of light, food and water.
“We need to discover how to keep them healthy – and happy,” says Kevan.
“One specific problem we hope to solve is the tendency for bumblebees to escape
the greenhouses through opened vents, a fatal problem in winter months. By
studying bee behaviour and foraging patterns, we hope to discover what exactly
is luring them from the greenhouses. We need to know that before we can devise a
solution.”
For tomato growers and bee producers, who stand to lose from five to 10 dollars
for each escaped bee, the solution can’t come soon enough.
Two theories have arisen early in the research project. One relates to the
amount and type of light present in the greenhouse. Different plastic coverings
alter the natural light and it is thought that light plays a significant role in
bee productivity.
The other possibility is that the actual scent of the flowers has changed as new
plant varieties are introduced and the bees are no longer recognizing the
flowers properly. If they don’t find the flowers, they don’t pollinate them.
While the problem of bees disappearing from greenhouses is separate from the
recent bee losses in the Niagara region, any new information about bee
nutrition, stress and the impact of human activity on hives will benefit all
farmers. This past winter, farmers in some Niagara locations have had bee losses
as high as 90 per cent. A typical winter loss is between 10 and 20 per cent.
This project is funded in part through contributions by Canada and the Province
of Ontario under the Canada-Ontario Research and Development (CORD) Program, an
initiative of the federal-provincial-territorial Agricultural Policy Framework
designed to position Canada’s agri-food sector as a world leader. The
Agricultural Adaptation Council administers the CORD Program on behalf of the
province.
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For more information:
Nadine Armstrong
Communications Manager
Agricultural Adaptation Council
Ph: 519-822-7554
E-mail: narmstrong@adaptcouncil.org
Website: www.adaptcouncil.org
