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Section Symposium

Plant-Insect Ecosystems

Pollinators, Pests & Pesticides: Innovation in IPPM

WiBee 2.0: An innovative tool for grower engagement and pollinator management in fruit crops

Tuesday, November 11, 2025
10:40 AM - 10:55 AM Pacific
Location: Oregon Convention Center, Portland Ballroom 254, OCC
Oral Presentation
With growing concerns about pollinator declines, fruit and vegetable growers want to know if they can rely on wild bees alone to pollinate their crops. We developed an innovative pollination management tool that provides crop-specific pollination recommendations, building on the WiBee app, a simple smart-phone enabled tool that allows standardized observations of pollinator visitation to flowers. We collected visitation rate data across 6 different insect morphogroups to estimate the activity of flower visitors during the spring or summer bloom period for apples, cranberry and pumpkins in Wisconsin in 2023 and 2024. Combining this information with measurements (or literature values) of single-visit pollen deposition, we were able to estimate pollen supply to individual flowers and the likelihood of meeting full pollination needs in a crop. We found that although the activity of wild bees varied greatly across farms and was lower than honey bee visitation (except in pumpkin), in almost all cases ( >70%) wild bees were sufficient to provide full pollination across all three crops. We are building the functionality of the pollination estimation tool into an updated WiBee 2.0 app for use by growers and crop scouts.