Cucurbit pollination: are courgette flowers an important floral resource for pollination?

Find out about the role of courgette flowers in supporting pollinators and learn about the benefits of additional flowers for maintaining bee populations.

Courgette flowers provide vast quantities of nectar and pollen to attract insects and encourage pollination. Our study looked at the behaviour of 394 bees sampled from 42 colonies across 14 sites. Buff-tailed bumblebees regularly collected nectar from courgette flowers, but courgette pollen was not found in any of the foragers’ pollen loads.

This shows it’s important to provide other flower types to meet bees’ nutritional need for pollen – this will improve the health of the bee population and enhance courgette pollination.

Growing wildflowers in field margins has other benefits, such as reduced soil erosion and improved soil health and structure.

Adding our findings to a virtual bee population simulator (BEE-STEWARD: beehave-model.net) showed that courgette nectar is a valuable food resource for bumblebees. This is because crop flowering coincides with the period when bumblebee foragers are most active. This means more bumblebees in your crop, and therefore more pollination, as well as more nectar returning to the bumblebee colony.

Late-flowering courgettes will benefit from being planted close to early-flowering courgettes. This is because late-flowering courgettes will benefit from the increased number of bumblebees which rise with the early flowering courgettes. This means more pollination in late-flowering courgettes and a longer flowering period of courgettes overall, which will further benefit the bumblebee population.