SPECIES COMPOSITION OF POLLINATING INSECTS ASSOCIATED WITH THE CROPS

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Pollination is essential for maintaining biodiversity and sustaining the world’s food supply. In 2005 , a valuation of the pollination service provided by insect pollinators mainly bees , to grow the main crops was about USD 208 billion- which is about 10% of the total value of the global food production. However over the last 20 years, a significant number and variety of pollinators disappeared from the ecosystem. Therefore, stemming the pollinator decline and ensuring pollinator services is the urgent need. The first step of the conservation of pollinators is to create awareness on the existing pollinators. This can be initiated by assessing pollinator species and their requirements such as ecology and biology along with their services to the region concern. All these information should be in a compile data-base as a fundamental source in pollinator management .

Diversity of Pollinators: Insects birds and mammals are the main faunal groups of pollinators for flowering plants. Many fruit and vegetable crops are pollinated exclusively by insects, mainly bees which are specially evolved for pollination soon after introduction of flowering plants. Among the bees – honey bee is the most effective members. Insects, other than bees, - butterflies, moths, beetles, ants, wasps, flies and midges are also pollinate plants. Several work had been carried out on the role of ‘Pollinators’ which are most important biotic factor of fruit setting in crop and the effect of their reduction in diversity and abundance on yield by various places Keven, et al., 1990; Chao and Lee, 2010). The importance of non- honey bees as crop pollinators are now recognized through field studies for different group of crops , as a part of sustainab...

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...g five genera of three families namely Apis dorsata, Apis cerana, Apis florea Trigona irridipennis Xylocopa sp. and Ceratina (Pithitis)binghami Of Family Apidae ; Halictus lucidipennis of family Halictidae) and Amegilla comberi of family Antophoridae , were found to be associated with the floral hosts of Curcubitaceae crops, and this association could leads pollination. In addition, three ant species and two species of dipteran flies were observed in the flower but their visitation cannot be related to the pollination as no pollen grains were noticed on their body.
Among the bee species recorded from this survey, Apis cerana and Apis dorsata are the frequent visitors for almost all types of flowers and it was already reported that those bees are visited to several other plants such as crops and ornamental flower plants by Karunaratnae, et al. 2005.

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