The value of bees to the coffee harvest

David W. Roubik ()
Additional contact information
David W. Roubik: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Unit 0948

Nature, 2002, vol. 417, issue 6890, 708-708

Abstract: Abstract The self-pollinating African shrub Coffea arabica, a pillar of tropical agriculture, was considered to gain nothing from insect pollinators1,2. But I show here that naturalized, non-native honeybees can augment pollination and boost crop yields by over 50%. These findings, together with world coffee-harvest statistics and results from field studies of organically shade-grown coffee, indicate that coffee plants would benefit from being grown in habitats that are suitable for sustaining valuable pollinators.

Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/417708a Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:417:y:2002:i:6890:d:10.1038_417708a

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/417708a

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().