Coffee Place

☕ 🦋 Coffee plant; Butterfly

Coffee varieties can be self-pollinated, but the presence of pollinators improves the quality and size of the coffee beans.

The Coffee forests are known to harbor all types of butterflies, some of them so rare that they are found nowhere else on Planet Earth. A few are endemic and the others widely distributed throughout the Coffee Agro climatic regions. Butterflies are highly active during the day and can be seen fluttering around from 10.00 in the morning up to 4.00 in the evening. They are gifted with an excellent vision but have a weak sense of smell. Unlike bees, butterflies can see red.

Even though honey bees are the major pollinators worldwide, over three quarters of the world’s food crops depend at least in part on pollination by insects and other animals. Butterflies, flies, moths, wasps, beetles, birds and bats are also actively involved in pollination.

Many butterflies emit scents that attracts the opposite sex. These scents often smell like the flowers that they are attracted to and hence keep visiting them often and this in turn aids in pollination.

We need to realize that butterflies are in plenty inside the coffee ecosystem but are less efficient than bees when it comes to coffee pollination. This may be due to the fact that they lack specialized structures for collecting pollen. Nevertheless, they have their strength in numbers, there by playing a significant role in pollinating coffee and multiple crops associated with coffee.

Researchers have found that coffee and timber plantations in Ethiopia encouraged more butterfly species diversity than cropland when compared to numbers in natural forests.

🦋 There are about 17,500 species of butterflies in the world. About 376 species are known from #Ethiopia, 33 of which are endemic.