Qingdao Promotes Bumblebee Pollination Technology to Boost High Yields of Tomatoes and Other Crops

As the depths of winter set in, tomatoes and strawberries in some of the city's solar greenhouses have begun to flower and set fruit. Recently, the Municipal Agricultural Technology Station held an on-site demonstration meeting on bumblebee pollination for greenhouse vegetables in Jimo to promote this technology. It is understood that using bumblebees to pollinate greenhouse vegetables is a low-cost, high-efficiency, pollution-free agricultural technical measure. Compared with artificial hormone pollination, bumblebee pollination can reduce the incidence of gray mold, reduce labor, reduce the use of chemical pesticides and flower-setting hormones, increase vegetable yields by 20%-30%, and reduce the rate of misshapen fruit by 30%-60%.

Bumblebees have been widely used for pollinating crops in protected and open-field cultivation worldwide. As early as 1999, China achieved successful technology for artificial rearing of bumblebees, but as of now, bumblebee pollination has still not been widely applied in our city. Of the city's approximately 100,000 mu of solar greenhouses, only a few thousand mu use bumblebee pollination. Surveys found that the concerns of many vegetable growers about the application cost of this technology, bumblebee management methods, and production results are an important obstacle. "A box of bumblebees (40-50 bees) costs between 350 yuan and 400 yuan, and can be kept in the greenhouse for about 1 to 2 months. Each greenhouse uses two boxes, so the cost alone is more than 700 yuan. At present, it is used relatively widely in large vegetable bases, because the cost of using bumblebees is about the same as the labor cost of manual flower setting. Not many greenhouses managed by individual farmers use bumblebees yet. However, as the cost of using bumblebees declines, this technology is expected to be applied more widely." said a staff member of the Municipal Agricultural Technology Station.

In order to popularize and apply bumblebee pollination technology as soon as possible, the Qingdao Municipal Agricultural Technology Station introduced Koppert bumblebees from the Netherlands and domestic bumblebees from Jinan, and arranged a comparative experiment on bumblebee pollination at the Qingjian Moshangchun Vegetable Standard Park. From the pollination results, there was no significant difference between the pollination performance of domestic bumblebees and imported bumblebees. Compared with artificial hormone pollination, bumblebee pollination can reduce the incidence of gray mold, reduce labor, reduce the use of chemical pesticides and flower-setting hormones, increase vegetable yields by 20%-30%, and reduce the rate of misshapen fruit by 30%-60%. The vegetables also taste very good.