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| Andrena bee visiting a
blueberry flower. Photo credit: Scott McArt |
Many crops need pollinators to produce fruits or
seeds. However, pollinators can also carry some diseases that infect crops when
they come in contact with flowers. Highbush blueberry, is an economically
important crop whose yield can be reduced up to 80% by mummyberry disease,
which is vectored to flowers by pollinators.
This creates a challenge for management since pollinators are needed to
maximize yield but also vector a highly damaged disease. We collected floral
visitors to blueberry plants and used molecular techniques to identify the
visitors and measure how many pathogen spores were carried by each visiting
species.
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