Significance of pollinizers in arid fruit culture: A review

The ‘pollinizer’ is a plant that produces pollen, often essential for fruit set, growth and development. Whereas, a pollinator is the biotic agent that moves the pollen, such as bees, moths, bats, birds etc. The pollinizers are not only important for improving fruit set, yield and quality of commercial cultivars but essentially desired for self-incompatible varieties and where assisted pollination is needed. Apart from this, the arid fruits like date palm is dioecious and Smyrna fig group require caprification, thus in both the conditions artificial pollination requires. A good pollinizer provides compatible, viable and plentiful pollen and blooms profusely at the same time that of commercial varieties so that to be pollinated and its pollen can be stored to pollinate the desired flowers in future too. All varieties having compatible pollen are pollinizers of one another if the bloom periods overlap. Pollinizer variety should be in proper ratio in the orchard as recommended for different fruit crops for getting a desired quality higher yield. But, in most cases, farmers do not accommodate adequate pollinizers in orchards may be due to a lack of knowledge regarding the importance of pollinizers in pollinating commercial varieties. Also, in case of arid fruits, very little information is available on pollinizers. Therefore, an attempt was made to collect and present available sporadic information on pollinizers with special reference to arid fruit culture.