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Insect pollinators are really important for food security their contribution to the production
of lots of different crops like oil seed ***, strawberries, field beans is crucial and actually
in the UK insect pollination services has been valued at in excess of £430 million
pounds per year. In our first study we were trying to measure
the contribution of insect pollinators to apple production in the UK. We know that insects
are important for production of apples they enable pollination of apples flowers but what
we don't know is the value of this insect pollution to the UK apple production. The
results of the study showed that we are also able to value insect pollination to the production
of Gala and *** apples and actually we showed that insect pollination is worth over £36
million to these two varieties alone. We also showed that currently the pollination demands
of some of our apple varieties Gala, for example, are not currently being met by pollination
services in our orchards so these varieties in particular would benefit from pollinator
management to improve apple production and apple quality.
Another study we have been doing is looking at trying to identify which pollinators are
really important for the pollination of oil seed *** and field beans which are two really
important UK crops. Our research has shown your management needs to be targeted to those
pollinators that are going to be effective pollinators of these crops for example to
improve pollination of beans you might want to manage bumble bee abundance and diversity
in the field for oil seed they are pollinated by a diverse community of pollinators.
The third project we have been conducting at Reading has been looking at the contribution
of honey bees or the potential contribution of honey bees to providing pollination services
to crops and we have explored this over 41 countries including the UK and all of the
EU and found that in 22 of them there were insufficient honey bee stocks to actually
pollinate all these crops. If honey bees were to be the only pollinator of crops in the
UK we would need another 1 million colonies in the UK alone and the UK is second only
to Moldova in its short fall we only have around a quarter of the honey bees in this
country that we would need to provide pollution services to all our crops and most of this
has been exacerbated by the expansion of oil seed *** particularly in the last 5 years
with the introduction of EU biofuel policies which are greatly increased demand for the
crop both in the UK and across Europe. So the take home of all of this is that honey
bees alone are not sufficient to provide pollination services in the UK and in several other countries
across Europe and we do need this diversity of pollinators to provide services not only
service delivery but service security as well in to the long term.