Pollinators Show Less Interest in Domesticated Flowers and Pollen

Cornucopia’s Take: Domesticated flowering plants have often been bred for high yields and fruit storage life, but it turns out the resultant flowers may not appeal to pollinators as much as their wild counterparts. Scientists are beginning to consider the quality and taste of the pollen from the perspective of pollinators. This article talks about using the gene editing technique CRISPR to engineer pollen, but sustainable farmers feed bees, bats, hummingbirds, and other helpful critters by growing diverse and open-pollinated crops and flowers.

As we breed crops to grow bigger and faster, they’re less delicious to the bees they depend on
The New Food Economy
by Matt Kelly

Bees prefer flowers that offer significant rewards, like high quality pollen. If we expect bees to continue spreading pollen on our farms, they need to get something in return. And CRISPR could help.

Domestication of plants has been a triumph for humanity; shaping crops to fit our needs made farming possible, which in turn laid the groundwork for civilization as we know it. But we’ve also discovered that our history with domestication is something of a pyrrhic victory. As we breed our crops to grow bigger, faster and more palatable than their wild counterparts, we might also be causing other essential traits to erode. We know, for example, that domestication has weakened the chemical defenses of certain crops against pathogens and plant-eating insects. Now there’s evidence that our tinkering may have caused other crops to become less attractive and beneficial to bees.

Blueberries and bees

Paul Egan from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and a team of fellow researchers recently completed a study of blueberries and bumble bees. They had a hunch: Because the chemicals that help a plant defend itself are widely found in both pollen and nectar, the weakening of these compounds might also have an effect on the plant’s connection with pollinators.

When they compared domesticated and wild cultivars of blueberries, they found that several functions were significantly reduced in the floral rewards of the domesticated plants. Specifically, the domesticated cultivars appeared to be less nutritious, less tasty, and lacking some disease-fighting qualities. To verify these results, the team fed bumble bees an artificial diet containing different doses of a natural antimicrobial found in blueberries; only at levels occurring in wild nectar was this compound effective in helping the bees to fight infection by a common gut pathogen.

Read the entire article at The New Food Economy

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