Pollen genotyping by SABER–MassARRAY reveals that fewer than half of honey bee visits can cross-pollinate a self-incompatible crop

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Kämper, Wiebke
Wallace, Helen M
Trueman, Stephen J
Griffith University Author(s)
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2025
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Abstract

Pollen limitation occurs when insufficient pollen or the wrong pollen genotype reaches the stigma. The pollination efficiency of flower visitors to crops has been investigated, but the genotypes of crop pollen carried have rarely been identified. We developed a method that detects SNPs in the pollen carried by single bees, using a customized single allele base extension reaction (SABER) with MassARRAY to distinguish genotypes that contribute only a small fraction to a mixed-genotype pollen sample. We used this method to identify the cultivars of pollen carried by honeybees at increasing distances from a cross-pollen source in two multi-cultivar macadamia orchards, one with wide single-cultivar blocks and one with narrow single-cultivar blocks. We found that many honeybees carried exclusively self-pollen. Only 30-53% of honeybees carried cross-pollen, representing the maximum that potentially contributes to crop production in self-incompatible crops. Distance from a cross-pollen source or the orchard design did not significantly affect the percentage of honeybees carrying cross-pollen. This study demonstrates significant potential to increase the effectiveness of honeybees as pollinators. Orchards can be re-designed to interplant cross-pollen sources and maximize the number of honeybees contributing to crop production. Improving pollination effectiveness will help to alleviate the growing shortfall in the supply of beehives required for crop pollination.

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Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

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292

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2049

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© 2025 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Agricultural, veterinary and food sciences

Biological sciences

Environmental sciences

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Kämper, W; Wallace, HM; Trueman, SJ, Pollen genotyping by SABER–MassARRAY reveals that fewer than half of honey bee visits can cross-pollinate a self-incompatible crop, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2025, 292 (2049), pp. 20250891

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