Dr Claire Allison1, Dr James Makinson1, Assoc. Prof Robert Spooner-Hart2, Prof James Cook1

1Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University, Richmond, Australia, 2School of Science, Western Sydney University, Richmond, Australia

Biography:

Dr. Claire Allison is a postdoctoral researcher at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, WSU. She specialises in pollination ecology, with a broad interest in insect pollinators of agricultural ecosystems. Throughout both her PhD and postdoctoral position at the HIE she has focused on how we can better manage stingless bees in macadamia orchards, in terms of deployment strategies, colony health and the factors that influence foraging behaviour.

Abstract:

Using colonies of eusocial bees to provide pollination services does not guarantee that a high number of individuals from those colonies will forage on the target crop. Yet, fidelity to the target crop is a desirable trait in managed pollinators. One method by which crop fidelity has been improved in honey bees is by deploying colonies at specific times in relation to the flowering period of the target crop. We investigated if similar effects could be achieved with stingless bees, an increasingly popular managed pollinator in Australian macadamia orchards. We deployed colonies of Tetragonula carbonaria at three stages of the macadamia flowering period. We captured returning pollen foragers and recorded colony foraging activity weekly, quantifying the relative abundance of the macadamia pollen they collected via light microscopy and ITS2 metabarcoding. We found that colonies located in orchards prior to crop flowering generally took longer to begin foraging on macadamia in comparison to colonies introduced after the crop had begun flowering. Pollen entering later deployed colonies was initially dominated by macadamia pollen, with pollen diversity gradually increasing over time, which was associated with an overall increase in the proportion of foragers collecting pollen. Our results indicate that stingless bees will prioritise the mass flowering macadamia crop when initially deployed in orchards, even when the proportion of the crop in flower is low, but that bees reduce their crop fidelity over time as colonies have more time to explore their surroundings. This research will aid the development of orchard pollinator management strategies.