Several people have now expressed opinions about the following questions:
>> A local avocado orchard grower is going to spray a bee phermone on his
>> blossoming avocado orchard to attract more bees to the blossoms. Has anyone
>> heard of this proceedure before? Would this be a viable project for other
>> plant species?
Decades ago bee researchers ended up along what I consider a very wrong
track --- believing on the basis of sparse evidence --- that some chemical
or other would naturally attract bees searching for food sources.
Gordon Waller (USDA) conducted many careful experiments in the 1960s and
found that learning could play a part in attraction to food sources.
However, various substances he tried failed to work as reported. (Waller,
G.D. 1970. "Attracting honeybees to alfalfa with citral, geraniol and
anise." J. Apic. Res. 9,9-12. ALSO, Waller, G.D. 1973. The effect of
citral and geraniol conditioning on the searching activity of honeybee
recruits. J. Apic. Res. 12,53-57.)
During that same period, Patrick Wells and I conducted a series of
experiments and achieved much the same sort of results as those obtained by
Waller. (Wells, P.H. and A.M. Wenner. 1971. "The influence of food scent
on behavior of foraging honey bees." Physiol. Zool. 44,191-209.)
Unfortunately for beekeepers, those carefully derived results largely
did not appear in beekeeping books (even today!), apparently due to a
desire on the part of some researchers to maintain 1950s dogma that Nasanov
gland extract will attract bees searching for food sources. Consequently,
we again find people trying to "re-invent" the wheel; a host of presumed
bee attractants has thus appeared on the market.
Pat Wells and I also reviewed this "attractant" subject in Excursus NG
("The Scent Gland [Nasanov Gland] of Honey Bees") of our 1990 book (ANATOMY
OF A CONTROVERSY: The Question of a "Language" Among Bees. Columbia Univ.
Press). However --- again unfortunately for beekeepers --- establishment
bee researchers wrote scathing reviews of that book, apparently without
having read it first. (By contrast, we received scores of laudatory
comments about the book from those outside the narrow field of bee
research.) Neither, apparently, do bee researchers cite that Excursus of
ours.
As Andy Nachbauer so well expressed the mess that occurred in recent
years: "In the end the difference between those who use these so called
bee attractants [and those who don't] does not measure up to a real crop
gain and does NOT gain enough extra crop to pay the cost in all but a very
few cases, which are used to promote the sale of the material to the next
progressive farmer."
Mark Winston and K. Slessor provided a more recent review (1993.
"Applications of queen honey bee mandibular pheromone for beekeeping and
crop pollination." Bee World. 74,11-128). On page 119 they summarized:
"Various products containing blends of worker pheromones and/or food
additives have been sprayed on flowering crops over the years in attempts
to attract potential pollinators and increase crop yields. These
commercially available products have hopeful names such as Beelure,
BeeScent, Bee-Here, Beeline, and Pollenaid, and likely contain various
components of the worker Nasonov pheromone, sugars, and/or attractive oils.
Unfortunately, none of these products or the individual components they
contain have proven effective in commercial pollination."
As Joe Traynor has stressed, the secret in pollination contracts is to
provide healthy bees --- and lots of them.
Adrian
Adrian M. Wenner (805) 893-2838 (UCSB office)
Ecol., Evol., & Marine Biology (805) 893-8062 (UCSB FAX)
Univ. of Calif., Santa Barbara (805) 963-8508 (home office & FAX)
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
***********************************************************************
* "...scientists are paradoxically resistant to change, even when *
* confronted with evidence that virtually demands change of them." *
* *
* Barber, 1960 (in Greenberg, 1983) *
***********************************************************************
|
