Solutions for Farmers || Food for Bees
Solutions for Farmers & Food for Bees
Multidisciplinary science for sustainable development: reconciling agriculture and the preservation of native pollinators in Canada
News & Events
Field work continues!
May 2025
The field season is progressing rapidly and the SPPB team is busy! As part of Amélie Morin's PhD project, we're looking after 42 bumblebee queens in a net tunnel at an agricultural producer's site, with the aim of evaluating the best floral mixes for sustaining strong, healthy bumblebee populations. Some have already started forming their own colonies!
We also collect pollen from crops and wild plants to analyze their nutritional content. We've collected pollen from apple, blueberry, poppy, cranberry and canola, as well as willow and black-eyed Susan... and there's more to come!
Our approach
Promoting the health and nutrition of native pollinators
Promoting the health and sustainability of agricultural production
Consideration of the economic and social reality of farmers
The establishment of sustainable agriculture requires integrating the interests of all stakeholders. This entails considering the needs and obstacles faced by producers when initiating research projects. We conduct surveys and interviews with farmers in Ontario and Quebec to assess their main interests and limitations in implementing bumblebee-friendly management practices. These surveys will also allow us to integrate their suggestions and recommendations to identify plants and associations of high agro-economic value to include in our experiments on the health and performance of bumblebees.
Nutritional complementarity of cultivated and native plants for bumblebees
Monocultures restrict pollinators to a monotonous, often deficient diet, increasing the risk of disease and reducing pollination and reproductive performance. We seek to identify the best combinations of plants (cultivated or cultivated-indigenous) providing a nutritious pollen resource adapted to bumblebees over an annual cycle, in order to target the combinations to be favored in agricultural environments to fight against malnutrition and decline of colonies.
Image: a sunflower in a cornfield. Sunflowers have interesting nutritional and medicinal values for pollinators. We are now looking to identify other plants with similar properties and adapted to our climate in Canada.
Improving the health of bumblebees in greenhouses to preserve wild pollinators
Commercial bumblebees are used on a large scale for the pollination of greenhouse crops. However, they often have a low resistance to diseases, and may thus pose an additional threat to wild bees, by increasing the transmission of parasites. We want to test to what extent the establishment of sunflower strips, whose pollen possesses medicinal values, operates as a simple and effective solution to reduce the parasitic load of commercial bumblebees in greenhouses before they enter in contact with wild bumblebees and other native bees.
Contact us
Canada: Centre de recherche et d’innovation sur les végétaux, Université Laval
2480 boul. Hochelaga, Québec, Qc, G1V 0A6
France: IPHC-UMR7178, CNRS / Unistra
23 Rue Becquerel, Bâtiment 60 (DEPE)
F-67087, Strasbourg Cedex
Contact us at:
mathilde.tissier[a]iphc.cnrs.fr
laurieauclair.sppb[a]gmail.com
