In my front yard, facing west toward Discovery Bay and the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the NE corner of the Olympic Peninsula, there are three fruit trees - one self-pollinating Montmorency (pie) cherry tree and two early apple trees that require cross-pollination, a Williams Pride and a Pristine. They started blossoming on April 20th this year. It was still too cool for any native bumblebees and the mason bees weren't interested in emerging. What is an orchardist to do?
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Follow me below the very polleny apple blossom for an answer.
OK, I'm not an orchardist, but I do have neighbors who are. Just down the road is Alpenfire, a commercial, certified-organic apple orchard where they produce the most excellent hard ciders from over 900 French and English cider-variety apple trees. This spring, the owners, Nancy and Steve, weren't seeing any pollinators in their orchard either because of the chilly weather. While colony collapse in honeybees is clearly a disaster and populations of native pollinators have also been declining, in this case, we believe it was the weather. It really had been too cold. Anyway, we got to chatting and bemoaning the lack of bees for our apples when we hatched a plan.
Nancy suggested that it would be cool to teach middle-school kids about the science of bees and other pollinators by having them come out on a field trip to "Be the Bees" and use paintbrushes to spread pollen among the apple blossoms. I have some contacts in the schools that helped to make this event happen.
4th grade girl painting apple blossoms with pollen.
It was a rainy, gray, and cool day. The lack of bees on that particular day was good for two reasons - there was no reason for the kids to worry about getting stung as they reached in among the blossoms and it provided a great way to talk about what a world without pollinators would be like. The kids learned about the range of insects that could serve as pollinators - flies, butterflies, and bees of all sorts. Yes, that little beetle inside that flower is also being a pollinator.
Did you know that it's possible to buy bags of frozen apple tree pollen? "Controlled Pollination" is a horticultural practice that has been a part of the apple industry in WA state for around eighty years all because of some bad advice. During the Great Depression, farm advisors told orchardists to concentrate on only the two most popular commercial varieties, Red Delicious and Winesap. After entire orchards were replanted in just these two varieties, it was discovered that they couldn't cross-pollinate effectively. This created a new industry in which pollen was harvested and paintbrushes were used for hand-pollination. Now, pollen is collected, processed, and frozen in one season to pollinate the following year. Big operations now use various methods of application from dropping pollen out of aircraft to specially designed bee-hives where the bees have to cross over a mixture of pollens, to ensure cross-pollination, on their way out to the trees.
My neighbors ordered about a gallon-sized ziplock bag of pollen. Expensive stuff! The 4th graders dipped their paintbrushes into little cups of pollen and "painted" the blossoms. The girls and boys took different rows and they will come back in the fall to see who did the better job.
After the field trip, I got to bring home the remainder of my little cup for our two apple trees. It seems like it was a success!
Is that an apple-in-progress (on the Williams Pride tree)?
The weather has since warmed up and bumblebees are now all over the berry bushes. I went out to get a few pictures and was astounded by how many different kinds I could see.
Bombus melanopygus - Black-tailed Bumble Bee
I've been attempting to ID them and, of course, that has led to some research (see this and this) on bumblebees. It turns out that wild, native bumblebees are 2 to 3 times better pollinators than honeybees. They have been doing an outstanding job all along without getting the credit they are due. Bumblebees are interested in collecting the pollen while the main focus for honeybees is the nectar, so they have developed different techniques. Bumblebees sonicate, which means they vibrate the pollen grains loose by revving their wings. Bumblebees also work in a wider range of weather conditions including cloudy and rainy days while honeybees prefer sunshine. Even so, there are limits to their tolerance for cold temperatures such as we experienced this spring. Bumblebees are also threatened by pesticides, diseases, and habitat loss. Unfortunately for huge agricultural monocultures, bumblebees can't just be transported to the next site for a new crop when the blooming season for the first crop is over. They need a succession of local plants upon which to forage throughout the summer. Fortunately, both my backyard and the cider orchard up the road are pesticide-free and offer many diverse plants in the vicinity of our apple trees to sustain wild pollinators all summer long.
Your turn! Got bees? Got pollen? What else is happening in your backyard?
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