Honey bee (Apis mellifera) hive placement is more influential than orchard layout on the fruit set of a dioecious crop

Managers of insect-pollinated orchards face many decisions that can significantly influence crop yields, including managing pollination through use beehives or the layout cultivars in orchard. Understanding relative importance and interactions between these multiple empirical field trials is rarely possible, so modeling approaches provide valuable insights generate new hypotheses. Based on kiwifruit (Actinidia chinensis var. deliciosa (A. Chev.) A. Chev. ‘Hayward’), a dioecious fruiting vine, as an exemplar, we used spatially-explicit system differential equations lattice to explore effects overlap male female flowers, hive placements within orchard, orchard predicted success. In our model, placement influenced proportion fruit set more strongly than flowering synchrony. Simulations with hives distributed evenly around had most set, while located at single point resulted relatively low set. Our model showed effect distribution was important for production planting regime. We have demonstrated how such be key information orchardists optimize their yields. predicts are important, consideration during likely greater final productivity functionally crops.