Agrobio gets its hives ready for biological pollination of fruit trees

The Almería-based Company Agrobio is still working on the development of many investigation lines related to the control and prevention of plagues in fruit and vegetables and biological pollination, and now the Company is also working hard in the fruit growing field. The manager of the Company, José Antonio Santorromán, has enhanced the great labour that the I+D department have been working on. He talked about a great new that will be soon on the market: "we are working on hives specially design for fruit trees".

If we want to use this technique on trees, we will need to change the packaging. The containers are modified so that they can resist adverse climatic conditions such as rain or wind (they're "stronger and more powerful"), and they are bigger, "three or four times more".

The reason for that is the great density that needs to be treated and the timeline of varieties. Santorromán said "The trees are in bloom and they need to be pollinated in short time". Some of the varieties of trees that are going to be treated are the apricot tree, the plum tree, the cherry tree and the medlar tree. The Company has reached some collaboration agreements with many Catalonian, Levant or Aragón-based cooperatives to carry out some "field studies" this very Spring.

By now some studies have been carried out in short-scale field related to biological pollination of fruit trees, and according to the first results, "we think it's really going to work". They will announce the results soon, although this process is being stopped for a while. The manager of the Company pointed that bumblebees may be helpful now that the bee population has decreased.

Agrobio's research team is working at the same time on solutions for biological control in fruit growing with the main goal of "using the advances we achieved on horticulture in fruit growing. There's still much work to do there".

The third line of investigation (that refering to auxiliary fauna and plague control) is still moving forward to get better features and end some insects' varieties. Santorromán explained that they are working on new production lines of insects and mites.