This study was carried out during the 2025 growing season, with the aim to evaluate the effect of assisted pollination with an external source of pollen provided by “COMERCIALIZADORA ZIMEX LIMITADA”, on sweet cherry (Fig. 1) and Actinidia (Fig. 4) commercial orchards.
SWEET CHERRY
Experimental set up
The trial on sweet cherry was set up in an orchard of the cultivar “Kordia” grafted on Gisela 6 located in Bomporto (MO), with major pollination problems. The grower reported of an historical low productivity due to scarce pollination of the cultivar, despite the regular introduction in the orchard of bumblebees during blooming time. The cultivar Kordia is known as an “not-autofertile” cultivar, with major pollination problems if not located close to other varieties blooming simultaneously, as it was the case in the commercial orchard considered.
The orchard, trained at V, was equipped with a white single-raw multifunctional cover (anti-rain and anti-insect) that was left close during pollination.
The orchard was planted in 2021, with a north south orientation. The distance between trees was 1.5 m within rows and 3.5 m in the inter-row with a density of 1905 trees/ha.
In the orchard, two main areas were selected and kept separated by opening one mono-raw net in the middle. At the two extremes of the orchard two treatments were set up on 16 trees each: 1) Control: with trees located as far as possible from beehives enriched with pollen 2) Artificial Pollination: with trees located close to beehives enriched with pollen.
