By Gauger et al.
A bumble bee visiting a muskmelon flower.
Vegetable growers commonly use forms of protective covers to help shield crops from insect pests, plant pathogens, and unfavorable climatic conditions. In particular, producers in the eastern and midwestern United States have adopted “mesotunnel” systems (a fine plastic mesh row-cover suspended over crop plants) for pest exclusion from cucurbits (melons, squashes, and pumpkins) and other crops. Cucurbit crops under the mesotunnel system require special management in order to achieve pollination, such as placing a commercial bumble bee colony into the mesotunnels, but little is known about how this environment affects bumble bee colonies’ health and reproduction.
Our primary goal for this study was to document initial evidence about commercial bumble bee colonies’ health outcomes in a cucurbit monoculture mesotunnel system. In the summers of 2022 and 2023, we planted large mesotunnels with cucurbit crops (muskmelon or acorn squash) and allowed Koppert Bombus impatiens colonies to forage within them for ~4 weeks. We dissected these colonies and compared them to colonies that did not forage at all, and colonies that foraged freely on the 100-acre organic research farm. We found that in 2023, colonies from the cucurbit mesotunnel had worse reproductive and overall health than free-foraging colonies, and in some measurements, performed no better than colonies that did not forage at all. This indicates that something about the cucurbit mesotunnel system is constraining bumble bee colonies’ growth and health.
Read the scientific publication in JPE
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