Spillover from flower plantings benefits apple pollination on a small scale

Abstract

Animal-mediated pollination is critical to support crop yields but is threatened by the decline of pollinator populations. The establishment of flower plantings in agricultural landscapes is a conservation strategy that aims to provide diverse floral resources for pollinators. Despite several studies on the effect of flower plantings on pollination, their effects remain unclear. In particular, the influence of the distance has been studied through theoretical approaches but field studies are scarce. We conducted field experiments over two years, 2023 and 2024, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region of France, to investigate how co-flowering plantings affect insect flower visitation and crop pollination in apple orchards. We found that the abundance of apple flower visitors, especially wild bees, decreased with the distance from flower plantings, thus suggesting a spillover of flower visitors from flower plantings into adjacent apple trees. Interestingly, we found a non-linear effect of the distance from flower planting on the initial fruit set, which suggests that flower plantings can improve apple pollination at close distances from the plantings (about 33 m). No effect of the distance from flower plantings was observed on the diversity of flower visitors, final apple fruit set or fruit quality. Overall, our results suggest that flower plantings are a promising strategy to support pollinators. Furthermore, as they can increase pollinator abundance in the adjacent apple flowers, flower plantings have the potential to enhance pollination and yield of the adjacent crops. Given the short distance of the observed facilitation effect, we recommend that flower plantings should be spread across farmland in order to promote crop pollination at farm level.