If you have an apple orchard, what you need are bees.
What you really need are wild bees, they make the best contact with the stigma in blossom, delivering the pollen most effectively. But wild bees are in decline, so orchard owners hire beekeepers to bring in hives to pollinate the blossoms. Honeybees aren't so good at pollinating, but they're better than nothing especially if you can't attract wild bees.
What you don't want is for your bees to get distracted when carrying pollen from one blossom to another. Pollen gets lost elsewhere, and the wrong pollen arrives at your blossoms.
In 1968 one researcher looked at orchards and found honeybees visiting both apples and dandelions. But they visited dandelions way more often. It looked like the dandelions were out-competing apples for pollinators.
So for over fifty years the advice has been to mow your orchard to get rid of distracting weeds. Now, Linn Vassvik and colleagues have tested this in five Norwegian orchards, to see how helpful mowing the orchards is.
It turns out the bees weren't behaving as expected.
Honeybees visited apple blossoms and dandelions, as was reported, but the honeybees that visited dandelions stuck to dandelions. The honeybees that visited apple blossoms stuck to apple blossoms. Not one bee of the 522 watched visits swapped species. But there was something odder with the wild bees.
In the orchards with dandelions, the wild bees much preferred the apple blossoms. It looks like the dandelions aren't a factor. Except for the factor that the team also found that more dandelion flowers meant more visits to the apple blossom.
One possible explanation is that apple blossoms are only around for a while, so the dandelions do the job of making the orchards habitable for wild bees until the blossom flowers.
So next time you hear that a weed is a plant growing where it isn't wanted, ask yourself, who doesn't want it?
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Vassvik, L., Nielsen, A., Garratt, M., Hatteland, B., Chipperfield, J., and Aschehoug, E.(2026) Alternate floral resources within apple orchards increase apple flower visitation. Journal of Insect Conservation, 30(4). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-026-00809-5.
Cover image: Wingscapes cameras used for bee observations. Source: Vassvik et al. 2026.
