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Filitsa Karamaouna works at the Department of Pesticides Control and Phytopharmacy at the Benaki Phytopathological Institute
where she conducts research in agronomy and entomology. She analyses the interactions between plants, insect pests and their natural enemies as well as pollinators to discover new ways to preserve their habitats in agroecosystems in the frame of integrated pest management.
1) How has COVID-19 impacted your work?
Due to the pandemic, we have had to work with new restrictions on our case studies. The seven fields where we conduct experiments are located 300 kilometers away from Athens, and normally we would do a three-day visit to complete our measurements. But during the pandemic, we could only visit the orange orchards’ fields for one day at a time in order to make measurements for the baseline of citrus. We went to observe the development of aromatic plants transplanted in the field margins, and assess the presence of pollinators (honeybees and wild bees) on natural vegetation of the field margins and citrus. Thankfully, we were able to do three field trips in each of the seven case study fields under PLANT-B, and introduce a total of 35 honey bee hives. Aromatic plants have been transplanted in five out of the seven case study fields. The other two will be used as control, and we have started sampling honey. We are now ready to start honey analysis in our labs at BPI.
2) Ideally, the result you are trying to achieve is to demonstrate that the adoption of PLANT-B’s innovating mixed farming system will lead to higher citrus and honey quality, is that correct?
What is very positive so far is that the flowering season of sage and savory coincides with the citrus blooming season. This will enable us to obtain this combination honey. We will see if oregano and rosemary will also blossom at the same time; oregano flowers rather late while rosemary early in spring. We hope that we will soon be able to move forward with the case study fields and choose the best use of pesticides to ideally obtain safer citrus fruits and honey food products.
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