Flowering blueberry crops in 115-metre-long tunnel houses are being used in trials examining the potential for native flies as a complementary pollinator to bees. Western Australian researchers have begun releasing native blowflies into three tunnel houses each holding more than 500 blueberry plants, to determine what impact they will have on the final yield and size of the fruit.
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It marks the fourth year of a national research project, led by the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) with funding provided by Hort Innovation and a range of collaborative partners from across Australia. DPIRD senior research officer David Cook said this year’s work aimed to build on previous results from the first three years of the trial, which have focused predominantly on avocado production. “We will be measuring fly retention in these tunnel houses and looking at their impact on blueberry yield as a result of their feeding on the flowers for nectar,” Dr Cook said. “Enclosure studies in two avocado orchards in the south-west of WA revealed two fly species in particular were capable of pollinating as many flowers as those in the open that would be pollinated by managed bees and any other insects in the orchard that visited avocado flowers. “At both Busselton and Pemberton field sites, two blowfly species, the European bluebottle (C. vicina) and ...
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