Around 70 per cent of the world’s cultivated crops benefit from pollinators. However, bees, like other animals, are threatened by agricultural stressors. Detailed knowledge of foraging behaviour in various landscape scenarios is therefore necessary to ensure that pollination by bees, as a vital ecosystem service, can continue to be provided in the future. Carrying out suitable sequencing methods and processing the resulting sequence data in such a way that these methods can not only be evaluated but also yield analysable results is an important step towards establishing sustainable nature conservation. In the longer term, nanopore sequencing is intended to be used primarily for rapid field investigations. This means that samples are collected, processed and sequenced using the MinION in the field, so that results can be obtained quickly and appropriate action taken. As early as 2015, a groundbreaking diagnostic study was carried out in the West African Ebola-affected region of Guinea, in which the Ebola virus was sequenced in real time using the MinION. Consequently, rapid measures could be taken to treat the patients1.

Sections of the genetic material (DNA) from pollen collected by bumblebees and honeybees have already been analysed using two DNA sequencing methods, in collaboration with the Chair of Functional Agroecology at the Georg-August University of Göttingen. In addition to the results obtained using a standard polymerase-based sequencing method, we employed the novel nanopore sequencing technique to analyse pollen DNA⁵. Using a specific section of the pollen’s genetic material, known as the ITS2 region, the plants visited were identified using bioinformatics and the pollen proportions were quantified. This revealed that, under the same site conditions, bumblebees visited a wider range of plants than honeybees. Furthermore, neither species is restricted to mass-flowering crops such as rapeseed – despite the additional effort involved, they always visit other flowering plants as well. This can be cited as a further argument in favour of establishing field margins.
Bioinformatic analyses of the sequence datasets revealed that modern nanopore sequencing is equally suitable for this research, but offers advantages in terms of portability and lower time and cost requirements⁶.