The bee curls her body around the conelike flower, grasping with her legs on one side and her mandibles on the other, so that the tip of the flower points down at the underside of the bee s abdomen. The bee then vibrates her flight muscles, without, however, moving her wings, and the vibration travels through the bee s body to the flower, shaking pollen from the anther pores onto the hairs of the bee s abdomen. She then combs the pollen from her hair with her middle legs and packs it onto her hind legs. In the process pollen falls on to the female parts of the same flower and self-pollination is achieved. Prior to bumblebee use, greenhouse tomatoes were successfully pollinated by wind or various mechanical vibration methods.
Bumblebees now do the vibration but at much less cost.
The cranberry flower also has such poricidal anthers and it is self fruitful, so many attempts have been made to effect cranberry self-pollination by shaking the flower in some manner. None of these attempts has led to great success. Wind and mechanical shaking seem to be ineffective in improving cranberry pollination rates. The lack of completely satisfying results with cranberry pollination tests using wind or shaking techniques would seem to suggest that buzz pollination is not perhaps the reason why bumblebees perform successfully as cranberry pollinators and are receiving growing interest. Nectar collecting honeybees in cranberries are much less effective transferors of pollen than pollen collecting honeybees, because of the way they work and the amount of pollen on the parts of their body that contact the plant stigma.