Strawberries, along with many other soft fruits, suffer from gray mold, a troublesome rotting disease. Although the fungus mainly damages the fruit, infections actually start in the flowers. One effective treatment is to spray those flowers with another fungus called Trichoderma. This organism eliminates the gray mold in the flowers before the fruit berries form, but causes no harm to the fruit itself.

A group of scientists at Cornell University has worked out a way to use bees to disperse beneficial microorganisms such as Trichoderma to strawberry flowers. The system works by putting spores of Trichoderma into a specially designed tray, which is then fixed to the entrance to a beehive. The bees pick up the Trichoderma spores on their legs as they walk out of the hive, and deposit them on the flowers they visit as they search for pollen and nectar.

However, the system does have a couple of drawbacks. Bees will only fly about in good weather. So if your fruit blooms on a rainy day, it will not be visited by the bees.

(Adapted from an article in The Economist)