Claudio Gratton, a professor in the entomology department, received $750,000 for his project WiBee 2.0: An innovative app-based citizen science decision support system for crop pollination through NIFA’s AFRI Pollinator Health: Research and Application program. It was among 25 projects sharing $11.6 million in funding.

Project summary (from CRIS website): Bees and other pollinators play a vital role in both natural and agricultural settings providing the pollination services needed to produce many of the fruits and vegetables we eat. Many farmers use managed honey bees to pollinate their crops but wild bees are also excellent crop pollinators. With recent shortages of honey bees and declines in wild bees, farmers wonder if they can rely on wild bees alone to pollinate their crops. But little is known about farm-scale wild bee activity and few tools exist to help farmers make decisions about their pollination management. In this project, we will work with growers and agricultural professionals to develop a pollination management tool that provides crop-specific pollination recommendations, building on our existing WiBee: The Wisconsin Wild Bee App (pronounced “wee-bee”, https://pollinators.wisc.edu/wibee), a simple smart-phone enabled tool that allows rapid, standardized observations of pollinator visits to flowers.To do this project, we will work closely with our grower and industry collaborators in three of Wisconsin’s principal pollinator-dependent specialty crops: apples, cranberries, and squashes. Since these crops bloom at different times of the growing season when bee activity may vary, we will develop crop-specific observation protocols to accurately estimate the rate that bees visit each crop (objective 1). We will then take measurements in each crop to see how bee visitation rate relates to pollination outcomes such as the number of grains of pollen deposited on each flower by different groups of pollinators. Pollen deposition is a good predictor of fruit set and yield and is a direct result of pollinator visits. Together, these pieces of information will help us establish a Pollination Service Index (objective 2) which provides an estimated level of pollination that is being delivered by different pollinators on a farm. Ultimately, we will incorporate the information we gather in this project into a new and improved WiBee 2.0 app that can help farmers and crop professionals decide if they should use honey bees for pollination or if the wild bees are sufficient (objective 3). Coupled with traditional and digital outreach, training materials, we will work to make this tool useful for pollination management and how integrates with other crop-management decisions such as pest control.