Category Archives: Pollination

There’s an estimated 350,000 described species of pollinators, and many, many more undescribed. Only about 20,000 of these (i.e. less than 6%) are bee species, although you wouldn’t know it from the media obsession with bees. It’s important and and timely, therefore, that a team of South American scientists have come together to propose a special issue of the Journal of Applied Entomology that focuses on these “other” insects.

The special issue will be called “The Neglected Pollinators: Understanding the Importance of Lesser-Known Insect Taxa in Pollination”. Consider submitting a manuscript if you work on anything except bees! Here’s the link to the details of how to submit your work:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/14390418/homepage/call-for-papers/si-2023-000411

Making plant-pollinator interaction data FAIR – a new draft report just published

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One of the projects in which I’m currently involved is the WorldFAIR project. Funded by the European Commission, WorldFAIR is exploring how to make data FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable – across a range of different disciplines in the sciences and humanities.

My involvement is specifically with Work Package 10, which is focused on data standards for plant-pollinator interactions, particularly as they relate to pollination of agricultural crops. After a year of hard work, I’m delighted to announce that our interim draft report from this Work Package has just been published! You can read the summary and download the report from Zenodo – here’s the link: https://zenodo.org/record/8176978

In addition there’s an associated webinar taking place on August 22nd – more details here: https://worldfair-project.eu/event/rescheduled-worldfair-rdas-10-year-anniversary-the-worldfair-case-study-on-plant-pollinator-interactions-wp10/

There’s more to come over the next twelve months and I’ll post updates as and when they appear. In the meantime, do check out the WorldFAIR website for information about the other Work Packages, their webinar series, FAIR data standards, and so forth.

Should honey bee hives be placed on or near conservation sites?

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Earlier this week, the East Midlands Environment Agency proudly tweeted that they had placed honey bee hives on an ecologically important site that they own. As you might imagine, the response from pollinator experts such as myself, conservation NGOs, and some beekeepers, was not positive, as you can see if you look at the comments beneath my tweet:

If this is an important site for nature conservation, as claimed, then the #EnvironmentAgency should NOT put hives of honey #bees on it!

All the evidence shows that honey bees out-compete wild insect #pollinators and can pass on diseases to wild bees.#ecology #biodiversity https://t.co/DpioVTSB5Q
— Prof. Jeff Ollerton – @JeffOllerton@ecoevo.social (@JeffOllerton) July 12, 2023

By coincidence, overnight I received a message from someone in the USA asking for advice. Here’s a redacted version of their message:

My community has a 4 acre serpentine barren site that is part of a larger string of these unique barrens ….. Honey bee hives have recently been located adjacent to the barrens. Can you advise me as to the best way to determine whether there are, and to document any, adverse effects to the serpentine barrens native pollinators?

The question of how managed honey bees can impact wild pollinators and the pollination of wild plants is one that frequently comes up in the talks and training that I do. Many beekeepers share these concerns – see for example this very detailed blog post by Mark Patterson.

Going back to the question of how to assess any impacts, the simple answer is that it’s not easy and it relies on having good data. This was my response to my American correspondent:

Ideally you would need to take a before-and-after approach where you have data on things like number of native pollinator species, their abundance (including nest sites), rates of visitation of different pollinators to flowers, and fruit or seed set from particular plants. You’d then compare what was going on before the hives arrived with what’s occurring since their arrival.

If you don’t have the “before” data it’s much more difficult to assess if there has been an impact from the honey bees. However, the advice of most conservation groups is to adopt the “precautionary principle” and not site hives on or adjacent to areas of nature conservation value, especially if they are relatively small areas. See for example the Bumblebee Conservation Trust’s advice: https://www.bumblebeeconservation.org/managed-honeybees/

The precautionary principle is a well established concept across a range of areas, including health and engineering, as well as nature conservation. In the latter it needs to be more widely applied, especially when it comes to questions of where to site honey bee hives, and how many.

Week-long Master’s course in Italy – March 2024 – on Pollination as an Ecosystem Service

That’s a wrap! The manuscript of my next book is with the publisher

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Yesterday I sent the manuscript of my next book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship to my publisher, Pelagic. I’d promised the full draft by the end of May, and I did it!

But just as when a movie director says “That’s a wrap” at the end of the final day of filming, the hard work does not stop here. Two people have read the full manuscript as I was producing chapters and their suggestions have been incorporated into this draft. The publisher will now send it to a third, independent beta reader and once their feedback has been acted on it will go to a copy editor who will suggest stylistic changes, check for logic and consistency, and so forth.

At the same time I will be choosing which plates to put in the book, which images to use on the back cover, writing their descriptions and deciding where to cite them; checking the sources and further reading sections for each chapter and formatting the references; and producing an appendix that lists the scientific names against the vernacular names that I am using in the book. I also need to finalise the acknowledgements section.

Once all of that is done, the publisher will type set the book and send me the proofs to check. At the same time as I’m checking those I will construct the index, a process which worked well for my last two books, Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society (also for Pelagic) and Plant-Pollinator Interactions: From Specialization to Generalization (which I co-edited with Nick Waser for the University of Chicago Press).

As an author, producing a book is a long process that doesn’t end with the actual writing of the manuscript. It’s incredibly satisfying, however, and working with Pelagic on my second book for them has been a great experience. All being well, Birds & Flowers should be out by early winter.

Now, I have three options for the next book that I’m writing….which one to choose…?

Insect pollination in deep time – a new review just published

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As a teenager one of my main interests was collecting fossils. In search of specimens I wandered for hours, scouring the Carboniferous coal shale heaps and Permian reef outcrops of my native Sunderland. I spent so much time bothering the geology curator at the local museum with my inquiries that he offered to host me for a year as the placement part of my college course. If I had been able to convince my tutors that paleontology was really just biology in deep time I may have ended up as a professional fossil researcher. But it was not to be and instead I spent a (mostly happy) year working in the microbiology laboratory of a local brewery.

My interest in the ecology of the past has never left me, and over the years I’ve contributed a few articles to journals commenting on the latest fossil findings as they relate to pollination and flowering plant evolution. So I was delighted to be asked by Spanish paleontologist David Peris to help with a new review of insect pollination in deep time, led by PhD candidate Constanza Peña-Kairath. That review has just been published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, and for the next 50 days it’s available for free download by following the link in the reference:

Peña-Kairath, C., Delclòs, X., Álvarez-Parra, S., Peñalver, E., Engel, M.S., Ollerton, J. & Peris, D. (2023) Insect pollination in deep time. Trends in Ecology & Evolution (in press)

Here’s the abstract:

Inferring insect pollination from compression fossils and amber inclusions is difficult because of a lack of consensus on defining an insect pollinator and the challenge of recognizing this ecological relationship in deep time. We propose a conceptual definition for such insects and an operational classification into pollinator or presumed pollinator. Using this approach, we identified 15 insect families that include fossil pollinators and show that pollination relationships have existed since at least the Upper Jurassic (~163 Ma). Insects prior to this can only be classified as presumed pollinators. This gives a more nuanced insight into the origin and evolution of an ecological relationship that is vital to the establishment, composition and conservation of modern terrestrial ecosystems.

Announcing my new book: “Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship”

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For the past year I’ve been keeping a secret from all but a few trusted confidantes: the subject and title of my next book! My publisher – Pelagic – has now announced it on their website and so it’s time to make it public. “Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship” will be the first book that covers bird pollination in its entirety, going beyond just hummingbirds, sunbirds and honeyeaters, to consider the more than 60 other bird families that interact with flowers, and the tens of thousands of plants that rely on them as pollinators. You can read more about it on Pelagic’s website.

The 3D mock-up of the cover shown above features an illustration by my good friend Stephen Valentine, a very talented artist who you may remember produced this painting of waxwings that Karin bought for my birthday a few years ago. I’m extremely pleased with how Pelagic have incorporated this into the design of the cover.

The book will be available by autumn I hope, if my writing schedule goes to plan!

Pollinators and the UN Sustainable Development Goals – free webinar on Monday!

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There’s been a lot of discussion recently about how pollinators can contribute to the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals. It’s a topic that I reflected on in Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society, and I’ve seen a few papers and articles that raise the subject – see here for instance. This free webinar on Monday 27th March is therefore very timely! To register, follow this link: forms.office.com\r\T5HrW0VZvS

Although I’m one of the speakers, I can’t make it in person as I’ve got teaching commitments at Roskilde University, so I’ve recorded my ten minute piece and I’m happy to answer questions via the Contact page on my website.

Prof. Jeff Ollerton – ecological scientist and author