Researchers from the Center for higher education and Tropical Agriculture Research in Central America and the Caribbean recently revealed the secret behind the finest coffee, and found that birds and bees are key contributors to making the grain larger and richer in taste, especially when animals meet in pollination and plant protection.
The researchers relied, according to a report for the site “Daily Mail”, on real-world experiments in 30 farms to produce coffee.
They conducted the tests on four comparison scenarios, where only the activity of birds was adopted in the first, the activity of bees in the second, the absence of activity of both animals in the third, and the natural environment, where birds and bees work together in the fourth.
In each of the scenarios, the research teams experimented with the quality, weight and homogeneity of the resulting fruit set. The three elements turn out to be better when birds and bees work together.
Alejandra Martinez Salinas, who led the study, pointed out that until now, researchers have typically calculated the benefits of nature individually, and then simply collected them, but nature is an interactive system full of synergies and exchanges.
“We are demonstrating the environmental and economic importance of these interactions, in one of the first experiments, to real-life scales within an actual farm,” she said.