Using clover in agriculture to improve bee forage and increase soybean yield

The corn-soybean crop rotation system is prevalent in the Midwest agricultural landscape. In this system, honey bees and soybeans have a mutually beneficial relationship where nectar is provided in exchange for pollination that can improve yield. However, this system is not perfect. Honey bees that live in this system do not always have access to a wide variety of food sources, leaving them nutritionally limited. Growers often have low-yielding areas of their fields that cost more money to farm than they return at the end of the season. Planting clover patches in low-yielding areas of fields could be a potential “win-win solution” for bees and growers. They could offer a supplemental food source that has a different nutrient profile, increasing access to adequate nutrition for bees. Additionally, clovers are a hardy plant that is familiar to growers through use as a cover crop. This experiment investigates the attractive potential that clover patches have to bees when placed within soybean fields and the degree to which increased bee activity in soybeans increases soybean yield. To do this, honey bee activity data was documented at different distances from clover patches through the use of audio recordings that were processed through a machine learning model that has been trained to detect bee buzzing. Yield data was collected through hand-harvesting. These data will test the viability of clover patches planted inside soybean fields as a way to increase forage for bees in the Midwest landscape while reducing costs and increasing yield for soybean growers.