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.
Bumblebees are often larger and certainly hairier.
Three to four pollen collecting honeybees equal one bumblebee. A bumblebee visit seems doubly effective in setting and forming larger berries than a honeybee visit. Honeybees are much more likely to desert the cranberry for more nectar rich crops in the neighborhood. Their ability to communicate the location of richer forage than cranberries is not shared by bumblebee colonies. All the above points are findings from the work of R.P. Macfarlane, Kim Patten and John Wang on cranberry pollinators in the Pacific Northwest, and Macfarlane s research in Wisconsin.