Quality fruit improvement in sweet pepper culture by bumblebee pollination

The percentage of ovules that set seeds per fruit has been used to evaluate the bumblebee activity of a two campaigns greenhouse trial. The experiment was carried out with two commercial cultivars of sweet pepper, ‘bell’ type, called Bardenas and Vergasa. The averages of the percentages of seed set per fruit of the two campaigns were 49.8% (Bardenas) and 40.7% (Vergasa) on the pollination treatment, whereas the averages of the control (self-pollination) treatment were 27.5% and 25.7%, respectively. Percentages of seed set per fruit was strongly related with the number of bee visits, but weakly with duration of visits.