Few crops are more challenging to pollinate than kiwi. Here’s the reason. For high fruit quality a large number of pollen grains per flower (> 3000) are required. Nectar production in kiwi flowers is generally poor, resulting in low attractiveness to honeybees. Furthermore, kiwi plants are “dioecious” meaning that male and female viable reproductive structures are on separate plants. The only way to set fruit is through cross-pollination. The proportion of non-fruit bearing, and thus “unreproductive” male plants in the orchard is generally limited, e.g. often 1 male plant to 5-8 females is advised. This limits availability of pollen.
▲充分授粉的红心猕猴桃
很少有作物比猕猴桃更难授粉。原因如下。为了获得高质量的果实，每朵花需要大量的花粉粒（>3000粒）。猕猴桃的花蜜产量普遍较差，导致对蜜蜂的吸引力较低。此外，猕猴桃植物是“雌雄异株”的，这意味着雄性和雌性可行的生殖结构在不同的植物上。结果的唯一方法是通过异花授粉。果园中不结果的、因此“不生产”的雄性植物的比例通常是有限的，例如，通常建议1株雄性植物对5-8株雌性植物。这限制了花粉的可用性。
▲猕猴桃雄花蕾
This explains why, in several countries, technologies for pollen collection and assisted pollination have been developed. Both dry and wet pollen spraying techniques are being utilized. Assisted pollination includes both manual and mechanical pollination techniques.
这就解释了为什么在几个国家已经开发了花粉收集和辅助授粉技术。干式和湿式花粉喷洒技术都在使用中。辅助授粉包括人工和机械授粉技术。
▲A picture of pollinating kiwi fruit
Assisted pollination techniques do allow to achieve good fruit quality. However, they are often not easy to apply. Growers either need to collect pollen themselves or have to purchase pollen from third parties, which should then be of high quality and disease-free. The pollen needs to be applied on the flowers. This process is labor intensive and often, wasteful in terms of pollen consumption. (e.g. with pollen spraying only a small fraction of the pollen ends up on the flowers).
辅助授粉技术确实可以实现良好的果实质量。然而，它们往往不容易应用。种植者要么需要自己收集花粉，要么必须从第三方购买花粉，这样花粉就应该是高质量、无病的。花粉需要涂在花上。这个过程是劳动密集型的，而且在花粉消耗方面往往是浪费的。（例如，在喷洒花粉的情况下，只有一小部分花粉最终落在花朵上）。
▲Kiwi pollen pollination
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