Solutions for Farmers & Food for Bees
News & Events
La pollinisation des cultures en serres nécessite l'utilisation de ruches commerciales de bourdons (Bombus sp.), souvent porteuses de maladies, qui vont être transmises aux abeilles sauvages, dont plusieurs espèces sont déjà menacées.
De plus, ces bourdons commerciaux, souvents limités dans la diversité alimentaire disponible en serre, peuvent développer des troubles comportementaux, réduisant l'efficacité de pollinisation.
Des solutions existent !
Pollinator-friendly measures useful for farmers
Are you a farmer or a beekeeper in Quebec or Ontario?
Our survey for farmers in QC and ON is now closed. You were 121 to participate, thank you !
If you provided your contact details, you will soon receive information about the results of this survey and the next steps of our project.
Your answers will guide us in our research, so that we can propose measures favorable to pollinators and relevant in the context of commercial production.
Current projects
Multidisciplinary science for sustainable development: reconciling agriculture and the preservation of native pollinators in Canada
In addition to this, you need to know more about it.
Promote the health and nutrition of native pollinators
Promote 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.
Qui sommes nous ?
We are a group of conservation researchers and practitioners in Quebec, Ontario and Massachussets, working closely with producers, agronomists, entrepreneurs and policy makers. We seek to identify solutions for a sustainable agriculture that combine the socio-economic reality of farmers with the ecological and nutritional needs of native pollinators.
Mathilde Tissier
Valérie Fournier
