Bees could resolve avocado problem: research
Research from The University of Queensland and CSIRO has found that bees could help prove Australia’s avocado crop is free of a pathogen that may be a barrier to exports.
To protect lucrative overseas markets, it is important to monitor for avocado sunblotch, according to Andrew Geering from the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI).
Australia has had an active control plan for avocado sunblotch since the 1980s because it could cut tree yield by about 80%.
“Even though this pathogen has nearly been eradicated, there is a chance there are still pockets of infection and this is a concern for Australia’s trading partners,” Geering said. “Because the viroid is seed-transmitted at a very high rate, a child in New Zealand using an infected avocado seed for a school project could introduce sunblotch to their country.”
A concept to detect plant viruses alongside bee viruses in hives developed by John Roberts, CSIRO scientist, allowed the research team to find a way to check for sunblotch without having to individually test each avocado tree in an orchard.
According to Geering, bees are brought in to pollinate avocado trees as a normal farming practice. This benefits scientists as it allows bees to do all the difficult sampling work, leaving the scientists needing only to test the pollen that the bees bring back to the hive.
“It’s much better than a team of people climbing up ladders or riding cherry pickers to collect leaves,” Geering said. “Bees are reliable, free and very thorough in their sampling activity.”
Geering plans to implement bee surveillance more broadly, aiming to roll it out in the Atherton Tableland, Australia’s largest avocado-producing area.
Roberts said that bees in approximately 530,000 commercially managed hives delivering paid pollination services could be recruited for more surveillance tasks.
“For avocado sunblotch, we can use them for annual monitoring during pollination across wide areas,” Roberts said.
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