In addition to wild pollinators visiting agricultural lands, ’commercial bumblebees’ (e.g. Bombus terrestris audax in Europea) have been used in glass houses and open-field cultivations worldwide since the 1980s. Indeed, bumblebees (Bombus sp.) are the most efficient pollinators for a wide variety of popular crops, such as tomatoes and strawberries, and it is also well-known that sunflowers produce better seeds, and kiwis ripen bigger fruits when bumblebees help to transport the pollen to the stigma1. The advantage of bumblebees in pollinating plants lies in the process in which they use specific frequency vibration of their thoracic muscles to shake out the pollen from the anthers of some plants (termed as ‘buzz pollination‘).2
Anthropogenic noise is a so far little-studied type of pollution that has been proven to negatively affect the physiology, nervous function and development of animals3, thereby it has the potential to disrupt even key ecological services such as pollination.
In my experiment, which was conducted between May 19 and 28, 2023 and is a part of my PhD work, I travelled to Szentes (Southern Great Plain, Hungary). There, I investigated the effects of anthropogenic noise on pollination activity/success of the buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) on tomato flowers under controlled conditions, in a poly-tunnel. I used three types of treatments on selected flowers: a noisy treatment (with traffic noise played from speakers); non-noisy treatment; and a treatment with the complete exclusion of bumblebees (thereby ensuring self-fertilization of the flower), without any played noise. After these treatments, I recorded data on the pollination event by carefully observing the stamen. Moreover, after fruit ripening, I will supplement these parameters with data from the tomatoes (e.g. the number of seeds) that will have been developed from flowers marked during the experiment.
We expect that individuals of buff-tailed bumblebee avoid flowers exposed to noise or spend less time on them in noisy environments than on flowers in non-noisy environments, which makes pollination less efficient. Thus, our results can be of high economic importance.
I am grateful to Gábor Deák (Szentes-Bio Kft.) for choosing the experimental site and for helping me with the organization throughout the experiment.
I also thank the Szentesi Pa-ri Kft. for providing the experimental site and for contributing to the follow-up data collection.
Last but not least, I thank the Talent Support Council of ELTE Eötvös Loránd University for supporting the experiment.
1 Cooley, H., & Vallejo-Marín, M. (2021). Buzz-pollinated crops: a global review and meta-analysis of the effects of supplemental bee pollination in tomato. Journal of Economic Entomology, 114(2), 505-519.
2 Vallejo-Marín, M. (2022). How and why do bees buzz? Implications for buzz pollination. Journal of Experimental Botany, 73(4), 1080-1092.
3 Kight, C. R., & Swaddle, J. P. (2011). How and why environmental noise impacts animals: An integrative, mechanistic review. Ecology Letters, 14(10), 1052–1061.
