Abstract:

Tea, with a long history of cultivation and widespread planting areas in China, is one of the world's top three non-alcoholic beverages. Guizhou has 466.7 thousand hectares of tea plantations, ranking first class among provinces and regions in China. How to effectively and safely control pests in tea plantations, and to improve tea yield and quality has been a research hotspot. The application of natural enemies to control pests in tea plantations has been widely studied and applied. Cavity-nesting Hymenoptera is an important group of predatory natural enemies in tea plantation ecosystems. In addition, some cavity-nesting Hymenoptera were also pollinators. Thus, this group Hymenoptera plays an unique role in the ecosystem. The artificial trap nest technique provides the nesting tubes for the cavity-nesting Hymenoptera. The harvested tubes were represented the character of the local ecosystem better than other methods since the nested tubes occupied by these Hymenoptera were all actual species living in the given habitats. However, this technique requires plenty of timing and labor input, which leads the limited data available so far. The present dataset was built based on data of cavity-nesting Hymenoptera living in eco-friendly tea plantations in three major tea-producing areas in Guizhou via the artificial trap nest technique. The dataset including information on cavity-nesting Hymenoptera species, quantities, prey ranges, nesting habits, and occurrence patterns, etc., was collected in 2021. It provides species list and dominant species and their basic needing characters, which allows further analyses on their population dynamics and biological control potentials.

Key words: tea, cavity-nesting Hymenoptera, biological control, trap-nesting