"Growers face huge challenges to achieve optimal pollination"

While bumblebee pollination's influence on crop yield is well known, the magnitude and time sensitivity could be often overlooked. Multiple research* have shown that tomato growers that utilize bumblebee pollination enjoy over 80% boost to their marketable yield, seeing both improvements in quality and quantity of the crop. For grape and cherry tomato varieties just 1 or 2 days of decreased pollination activity might result in the vine not developing fully. Meanwhile, high bumblebee activity poses a risk of over-visitation, damaging the flower and subsequently the fruit. 

Agrolabs team had come up with a solution for it. B-Control can monitor bumblebee activity as well as automatically open and close the hive. Effectively, farmers see deviations in the pollination activity early and can take corrective action.   

"B-Control users range from high-tech growers like AppHarvest (US) to even research institutions like the University of Warwick (UK) - there’s a wide interest to understand and improve pollination processes", says Michael Lazarenko, CEO with B-Control. 

He explains that growers face huge challenges to achieve optimal pollination. With the transition to LED lighting, a lot of greenhouses saw irregularities in bumblebee activity. Pieter Kaptein from TomatoMasters Deinze shared: “We use the B-Control system to learn more about the flight pattern of our bumblebees.  Because we have full-LED, we sometimes saw a reduced activity of our bumblebees on dark days in winter.  With this system, we have gained more insight into when they fly exactly less or more. This also gives us guidelines for our climate control on those days.” 

“It is worrying to see the range of pollination challenges growers from all across the world are facing”, says Michael,  “from inadequate pollination activity by local species in the UK to navigation issues and short activity lifespans in full-LED indoor facilities”. 

B-Control brings data-driven decision-making into the plant pollination process and the company works on further technologies that will help us to understand bumblebees better and adapt to the changing environment.