Crop pollination by bees and other animals is an essential ecosystem service in Uganda

At the national scale, pollination services may have been estimated to be equivalent of >16% – 25% of the market value of agricultural production. Few small-scale coffee growers were selected and invited to short discussions of whether bees increase coffee yield or not. As previously highlighted, majority of these farmers said they do not think bees are important for coffee fruit set. Consequently, coffee trees were selected and bagged to exclude pollinators. Farmers were asked to take care of the pollination experiments. The un-bagging process was run in their presence during the first blooming season  when farmers witnessed that bagged flowers had no fruit whereas un-bagged flowers that were regularly visited by bees did set fruits.

During experiments conducted in November-December 2007 in the same coffee fields, the researcher found that farmers were now fencing termite mounds to protect stingless bees nesting in termite mounds  because they were told during the first blooming season  by the researcher that these features  were used as habitats by various wild bees such as meliponini bees that pollinate their crops. When the researcher was setting experiments during the second blooming period,mobile vertical grow tables farmers were now asking for information about wild bees, where they live and what they eat and how to protect them in order to increase coffee yield. In this study it was found that pollination knowledge was shaped by a wide range of social, cultural, educational and individual attitudinal characteristics of respondents. It was also found that age, level of education, gender, general knowledge of importance of protecting natural and semi-natural habitats in the vicinity of coffee fields for coffee yield increase played no important role on pollination knowledge by interviewed farmers.

Contrastingly, the number of years passed farming coffee or the degree of contact with extension services were identified in the logistic model as most striking factors. In other words, knowledge of pollination by farmers was likely to occur in areas where they had access to regular extension service advices. Also, farmers who inherited their plantations and those who planted themselves their plantations were likely to know the word pollination. Therefore, it was recommended that these few factors that were identified, be taken into consideration to be successful during awareness campaigns aiming at raising farmers’ knowledge of the importance of conserving pollinators for coffee yield increase. Overall, it is important to increase the awareness of all small-scale coffee producers of the importance of con-serving pollinators within the farm landscape to increase coffee production. The role of extension services was found to significantly improve respondents’ knowledge of pollination, and hence the extension service institutions of Uganda should increase and be empowered. This will help in enhancing information provision to the farmers through, e.g., frequent visits, making bulletins or using other channels such as radio or television.

World wide, it has been observed that extension services have a significant impact on the learning process of farmers. There is also a need for extension services to inform farmers about the diversity and management of bee-food plants in the farm-landscape. There is a need to revise and incorporate in the school curriculum new concepts such as pollination such as young people; especially those leaving in rural areas are informed about the importance of pollinators and pollination services. Understanding farmers’ perceptions and motivations is of significant importance in relation to environmental services conservation. This can allow for gaining insight into the complex systemic interactions between natural processes, management policies, and local people de-pending on the environmental services . Ecosystem services such as pollination service are aspect of the environment that relate closely to human live hoods and that can be used to convince the public that biodiversity is not only wild animals that may damage their crops, but also creatures that live on their farms and that can help to sustain crop production. Further public awareness programs on ecosystem services such as pollination are highly needed While aiming at understand how farmers view the contribution of pollinators coffee yield, most farmers were saying that “either bees visit or not coffee flowers, fruit will still come provided that rains is here”. The reasons behind these thinking were not given.