What is pollination service?

Using a pollination service is one way to ensure pollination. In pollination service, beekeeper brings his bee colony near the crop plant requiring pollination and gets a fair recompense. The beekeeper takes care of the nest and collects the produced honey. The farmer, on the other hand, takes care that the cultivation activities do not damage the bees.

Pollination service can offer more than just pollination. Honey bees can also be used for biological control of gray mold in strawberry and raspberry cultivation, where the bees spread the biological pesticide when flying from the nest to the flowers. Honey bees can also be used to spread a biological pesticide used to combat apple storage rot.

Some plants particularly benefit from bee pollination. For example apple, raspberry and blueberry are plants that get high benefits from bee pollination. Most apple varieties need insect pollination to produce fruits and the importance of bees as pollinators in apple is high. Pollination also increases the size and quality of apples. In blueberry insect pollination can result in up to 5 times bigger harvest. In raspberries, bee pollination can produce up to 3.5-4 times bigger harvest. Honey bee is the most important pollinator of buckwheat, so it gets high benefits from the pollination service provided by beekeepers. Proper pollination increases the yield of the caraway, prevents falling of the seeds and the seeds are also ripened evenly. In broad bean, proper pollination increases the quantity and quality of seeds and pods and ripening of the pods is more uniform. The seed production of the clovers increases also thanks to bee pollination.

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What is pollination service?