Pollinators: Do Your Fruit-Producing Plants Need Help?

Great pictures, you are going to have a lot of grapes!

Gerald ,good photo essay and pollinating clinic . BTW, How do you like the Leica?

I love it just fine, though it is a departure from the traditional German-made LEICA, being produced in Japan in a partnership with PANASONIC. All in all, it is a very handy and good quality 10.2 megapixel camera, the best I could find for under $1,000 at the time.

Those are great... lemon and strawberries ect...

It looks like it will be a fruitful summer:) I just had a mango from our mango tree....yummy!

I don't need to see the photos to remember what a honeybee looks like. My neighbor two acreages over has, I think, eleven hives, now. Nothing DOESN'T get pollinated, that needs to around here. My grape vines, save one, all succumbed to the dry and cold winter this year. Got two or three starts off my mother's though, and am trying again...

There's been quite a bit of a scare about endangerment of bees as pollinators in the last few years. It is reassuring to know that you have a healthy community of them, Ron.

There sure has, Ron and Gerald, and as far as I know, we've only got one apiary here in CT, that sells (non-pesticide use) or any, local honey and I buy it whenever I can. I just bought a huge (to me) 5 lb. jar, and I know that it's last years, but who knows what will be harvested this year? I do know that where I tend to buy it, they've gone from a good-sized two, shelved, separate stand, in wood, down to less than one. Honey doesn't spoil and I know that I'll use it.
So, all the bees are in Kansas? Ron? And apparently wherever you are, Gerald, too. There aren't in CT anymore, though we have some that go underground that don't seem to pollinate anything other than to keep digging holes, which unsuspecting people like us, dig in (by mistake) to plant things and those babies BITE, or sting. They look like the fuzzy-type Queen bees, but they're not.
I have to go look at your profile, Gerald, so see where the bees are now. Local honey is just so much better. Grapes? Here? Nope. Too cold, I guess, same with lemons, though strawberries tend to grow well, at the farms that grow them, though we've had an extremely rainy season, so they ended up not producing like they should have. Also full of water, and very, very expensive.

Marilyn

I know the story, but for some reason, this guy seems not to have any problems yet. I've got my fingers crossed he doesn't. My apple trees are always loaded. The plums and pears should be big enough in a year to have some fruit. The peach trees too, I think. We came by yesterday, and he was collecting honey from the hives. It was interesting to watch....from a distance.

If we run out of honey bees, we have more than enough moths, bumblebees and other native bees and wasps to keep things going, I think.

The Concord grape strain were created in Concord, Massachusetts, Marilyn, using wild "fox" grapes indigenous to New England, and used to extreme cold every winter. However, my three vines were acclimated to Northern California, and the San Francisco Bay Area very rarely experiences frost conditions, and when frost does occur, it is never for more than a few hours of darkness at a time.
As for bees, we have them, but I doubt if there is an abundance here. Since the massive farms in the Central Valley are still producing great amounts of fruit and vegetables, they are obviously still being pollinated, but I HAVE heard there is concern over a drop in bee populations.

Those massive farms are probably hiring hives to pollinate things, Gerald. Saw a show on that a while back. Apparently, big growers, that have suffered a loss of the natural population of honeybees have created a whole industry of these guys that travel from one grower to another, with semi's full of bee hives. Those are the guys that Obama wanted to insure. If their losses in hives make it so they can't afford to keep doing it, then our food supply is in serious danger, these days.

Thanks for posting this to Texture Photographer

Since I live on a bit of ground that hasn't seen a pesticide in over 40 years, I have pollinators everywhere. The only thing I don't have is the tiny fly that pollinates kiwi - not native here (neither the fly nor the kiwi). I'm going to try a paint brush. I'm going to carry some paw paw pollen from a neighbor the same way as my lone paw paw needs a friend.

Wow! I haven't heard the term 'paw-paw' since I left West Virginia many years ago. Sort of an Apalachian papaya. The fruit almost tasted like banana. I had two fruiting paw-paw trees growing on either side of the massive 3-trunk elm tree where I built my 3-level tree house, in the woods behind the street where my family lived.
As for kiwi pollinators-don't they grow kiwis in California's central valley? I wonder how they manage to pollinate them?

Ah, yes--they DO have kiwi growers in California:

"...Fruit size correlates with the number of seeds, and this in turn depends on adequate pollination. Large fruits should contain from 1,000 to 1,400 seeds; small, unmarketable fruits may have no more than 50 to 100 seeds. Pollinators include bees and other insects.

Bees do not frequent all areas, so the home gardener may have to hand pollinate to guarantee large fruits. If you hand pollinate, remember that female flowers are viable and receptive to male pollen up until 9 days after opening. Male flowers have viable pollen for only 3 days after opening. To hand pollinate, simply pick a freshly opened male flower and rub it against a viable female flower for a second or two. You can use one male flower to pollinate as many as five female flowers before discarding it."

~ California Kiwifruit Commission