Butterflies As Ag Pollinators

Butterflies As Ag Pollinators

Susan Allen
Susan Allen
I'm Susan Allen with the Fruit Grower Report . While orchards are dependant on pollinators commercial grapevines are typically self pollinating with wind and insects playing a minor role. I had a chance to speak with Katy Prudic, assistant research professor in the Department of Entomology, at the University of Arizona and co-founder of the e-Butterfly website on butterflies' impact if any as ag pollinators.

Prudic: One thing that can be remembered is that butterflies don't nectar rob, bees when they have trouble getting into a flower will actually cut a hole in the flower and suck out nectar without pollinating. Butterflies don't have those type of mandibles s they have a straw-like structure call proboscis, so they sip nectar out so they are usually always more consistently involved in pollination. How much they pollinate how consistently they are among flowers, that's still kind of an open question in pollination biology. We've been spending a lot of time with honeys bees, they are good pollinators, easy to domesticate, or at least a lot easier than butterflies, they stay in an area, they come back, those sorts of things. Great things to have in an agriculture system but I can imagine pollinators such as butterflies or non-social bees would also be useful in certain environments, and we just don't know what they are yet.

One fun fact Katy told me is that Butterflies see the color red and have good color vision and can sense more wavelengths than humans or bees for that matter.

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