Dr Mark Goodwin of Plant & Food Research explains what artificial pollination is and why it is needed for kiwifruit. Some work of the company PollenPlus™ is shown, including their QuadDuster spraying pollen onto kiwifruit vines. Mark describes research he is doing on honey bees and kiwifruit pollination, with footage of research associate Heather McBrydie working on kiwifruit vines.
▲Kiwi insect pollination
Transcript
DR MARK GOODWIN
Artificial pollination is where human beings come in and actually add pollen into the system to do more than what just the insect pollinators are doing, and for kiwifruit, what we do is we harvest flowers, we mill them to remove the pollen and then apply it back on the flowers using a whole lot of different methods.
▲Bees pollinate kiwifruit
Growers use artificial pollination because we’re finding, over the last 10 years or so, that the bees aren’t doing as good a job as they used to.
We’ve got a whole lot of new varieties that we actually don’t know how to artificially pollinate, so we have to work out the parameters around when to put the pollen on and how much pollen you have to put on to get really good fruit out of it.
▲Bees pollinate kiwifruit
The first question we have to ask is how long the flowers are viable for. If they’re only viable for 1 day, you have to put pollen on every day. If they’re viable for a week, all you’ve got to do is come and put it on once a week. To work out the viability, what we do is, every day when the flowers open, we put paper bags over the flowers before any insects get to visit them, and we do that every day so that, at the end of a week, we’ve got flowers that are 1 day old, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7 days old, take all the bags off, pollinate them, put the bags back on and see which ones set fruit.
▲Bees pollinate kiwifruit
The way we work out how much pollen you have to put on to get a full-sized fruit is we take a whole lot of flowers and we put on different concentrations of pollen. The next thing we have to do is take half the flowers, cut off the stigmas, wash them and to count the number of pollen grains so we can get a relationship between the rate, the number of pollen grains that ended up on the stigma and the number of seeds that have been produced.
▲Kiwi insect pollination
The other question we have about this new variety is that fruit shape – size and shape – is very variable, and we’re trying to work out why. One obvious possibility is it’s all pollination, that the bees are really not doing a good enough job here. So what we wanted to know was how many bee visits you actually had to get to these flowers to get them fully pollinated.
▲Red kiwifruit
The way that we work out how many bee visits you need to fully pollinate a flower is that we put bags over flowers before they open, and when the flowers open, we take the bags off – we just stand there and watch them and wait for a bee to come and visit them. When a bee’s visited them, we put the bag over, let it develop into a whole fruit, remove the fruit, count the number of seeds and from that we know how many seeds are being produced from each bee visit.
The green kiwifruit needs something like 40 bee visits to every flower to fully pollinate it. If we find that they’re not getting enough bee visits, we have a number of options. One of them is to increase the number of beehives so there’s more bees visiting the flowers, or if that’s not possible, we use artificial pollination on top of what the bees are doing.
▲Winter pruning of kiwifruit orchard
Acknowledgements:
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Pollen-Plus Limited
PlusGroup Horticulture Limited
▲A kiwi orchard with abundant fruits
植物与食品研究所的Mark Goodwin博士解释了什么是人工授粉，以及为什么猕猴桃需要人工授粉。展示了PollenPlus™公司的一些工作，包括他们的QuadDuster将花粉喷洒到猕猴桃藤上。马克描述了他正在进行的关于蜜蜂和猕猴桃授粉的研究，以及研究助理希瑟·麦克布莱迪在猕猴桃藤上工作的镜头。
▲猕猴桃专家马克·古德温博士
人工授粉是人类进入的地方，实际上是将花粉添加到系统中，而不仅仅是昆虫传粉者在做什么，对于猕猴桃来说，我们所做的是收获花朵，将其研磨以去除花粉，然后使用许多不同的方法将其重新施加到花朵上。
▲Bees pollinate kiwifruit
种植者使用人工授粉，因为在过去的10年左右的时间里，我们发现蜜蜂的工作不如以前好。
我们有很多新品种，但我们实际上不知道如何人工授粉，所以我们必须计算出何时施加花粉以及需要施加多少花粉才能从中获得真正好的果实的参数。
▲Bees pollinate kiwifruit
我们要问的第一个问题是这些花能存活多久。如果它们只能存活1天，你必须每天都放花粉。如果它们可以存活一周，你所要做的就是每周来穿一次。为了计算出可行性，我们所做的是，每天花朵开放时，在任何昆虫造访之前，我们在花朵上放上纸袋，我们每天都这样做，这样，在一周结束时，我们就有了1天、2天、3天、4天、5天、6天或7天大的花朵，把所有的袋子都取下来，给它们授粉，把袋子放回去，看看哪些会结果。
▲猕猴桃蜜蜂授粉
我们计算出你需要放多少花粉才能得到一个全尺寸的水果的方法是，我们取很多花，放上不同浓度的花粉。接下来我们要做的就是取一半的花，剪掉柱头，清洗它们，并计算花粉粒的数量，这样我们就可以得到花粉粒的比例、最终落在柱头上的花粉粒数量和已经产生的种子数量之间的关系。
我们对这种新品种的另一个问题是，水果的形状——大小和形状——变化很大，我们正在努力找出原因。一个明显的可能性是，这都是授粉，蜜蜂在这里做得不够好。所以我们想知道的是，为了让这些花完全授粉，你实际上需要去多少次蜜蜂。
▲packaging kiwi pollen
我们计算出一朵花完全授粉所需蜜蜂造访次数的方法是，在花朵开放前将袋子放在花朵上，当花朵开放时，我们取下袋子——我们只是站在那里看着它们，等待蜜蜂来拜访它们。当蜜蜂造访它们时，我们把袋子盖上，让它长成一个完整的果实，摘下果实，数一下种子的数量，从中我们知道每次蜜蜂造访产生了多少种子。
▲Kiwi pollen is tested before sales
绿色猕猴桃需要40只蜜蜂造访每朵花才能完全授粉。如果我们发现它们没有得到足够的蜜蜂造访，我们有很多选择。其中之一是增加蜂箱的数量，这样就有更多的蜜蜂来拜访花朵，或者如果这不可能，我们在蜜蜂正在做的事情的基础上使用人工授粉。
▲恒温震荡气育培养箱检测猕猴桃花粉活性
致谢：
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Pollen Plus有限公司
PlusGroup园艺有限公司
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