Free e-book on apple pollinators

Great resource on native wild bees that help pollinate apples (and other fruits, too, of course!!!).

From the Northeastern IPM center:

Insect pollination is a vital service for agricultural systems, and bees are the most important of all insect pollinators. In the United States alone, the value of pollination services by bees is estimated to be $18 billion, but these services are threatened, and finding alternatives is crucial for long-term pollination success. Eastern orchards have a unique opportunity to simultaneously conserve wild bee populations and to benefit from their contribution to fruit pollination.

This 12-page, full-color guide helps readers identify wild pollinators, provide them with food and habitat, and avoid pesticides that are toxic to them. By encouraging wild bee abundance and diversity, agricultural growers may be able to buffer rising honey bee rental costs while creating an environment that better supports both wild and commercial bees.

 

Download Link

Local Food is Awesome!

My good buddy Mark Bowen had the honor of taking part in a roundtable discussion on local food in Alabama at the Alabama All Star Food Festival.  The event also made it onto grist.org.  Congrats Mark!!!  You can watch a short video of the discussion here: (for some reason I can’t get it to embed properly…)   Andy Grace, Rinske Dejong and Mark Bowen discuss the commitment needed for the future of Alabama food.

Apples are still “Wild”

'Wild Apple Clusters' by Alice Kelsey - check out her work! alicekelsey.com

There have been quite a number of intriguing studies done on apple genetics recently, and this recent piece from the Public Library of Science Genetics Journal is no exception.  Basically, our modern cultivated apples have not  really diverged that much from their wild ancestors.  Why is this interesting?  It means that there is still unlimited possibility in creating new kinds of apples – cultivation has not destroyed the genetic diversity and potential of the species.

Here’s the abstract:

The apple is the most common and culturally important fruit crop of temperate areas. The elucidation of its origin and domestication history is therefore of great interest. The wild Central Asian species Malus sieversii has previously been identified as the main contributor to the genome of the cultivated apple (Malus domestica), on the basis of morphological, molecular, and historical evidence. The possible contribution of other wild species present along the Silk Route running from Asia to Western Europe remains a matter of debate, particularly with respect to the contribution of the European wild apple. We used microsatellite markers and an unprecedented large sampling of five Malus species throughout Eurasia (839 accessions from China to Spain) to show that multiple species have contributed to the genetic makeup of domesticated apples. The wild European crabapple M. sylvestris, in particular, was a major secondary contributor. Bidirectional gene flow between the domesticated apple and the European crabapple resulted in the current M. domestica being genetically more closely related to this species than to its Central Asian progenitor, M. sieversii. We found no evidence of a domestication bottleneck or clonal population structure in apples, despite the use of vegetative propagation by grafting. We show that the evolution of domesticated apples occurred over a long time period and involved more than one wild species. Our results support the view that self-incompatibility, a long lifespan, and cultural practices such as selection from open-pollinated seeds have facilitated introgression from wild relatives and the maintenance of genetic variation during domestication. This combination of processes may account for the diversification of several long-lived perennial crops, yielding domestication patterns different from those observed for annual species.