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Post by Deleted on Jul 11, 2019 11:31:17 GMT -5
The last batch of seeds I bought included a description, days to maturity---the usual growing instructions and a phrase that went something like this "Pollinator increase 10-15% by weight".
This brings to mind that fact that I have not seen a honey bee in months. If there are pollinators out there I've not seen them, and I do not believe my melons, cukes, etc, and producing as they should.
Any thoughts? The people I know who still have bees report great difficulty in keeping hives alive. I've had as many as 15 hives, but gave them all to a friend when I left OK. Fellows here are losing them right and left. At one point I was wiped out over a winter and had to start over in OK. I was next to a peach and apple orchard.
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Post by paquebot on Jul 11, 2019 11:45:06 GMT -5
Many of the natural pollinators are so small that you can hardly see them. To get an example of what's in your area, let a few onions go to blossoms. You may get a mix of bees, flies, and wasps all at the same time. In the case of cukes and squash, don't be quick to destroy the striped cucumber beetles as they are also pollinators.
Martin
The truth is more important than the facts.
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Post by brownrexx on Jul 11, 2019 15:33:03 GMT -5
I have lots of volunteer dill that I keep for the black swallowtail butterflies and the flower heads are covered with all kinds of little bees, wasps and flies.
The honeybees are loving all of the white clover in my untreated lawn.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 12, 2019 9:20:12 GMT -5
Martin, Rex, I am loaded with clover, but not a bee in sight. a bumble bee now and then. There must be insects because there are resident birds working the garden, but darn fee pollinators I am especially concerned for the melons.
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caesg
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Post by caesg on Jul 12, 2019 9:32:22 GMT -5
@oxankle2 . Are you considering hand pollinating your melons? Or if that unrealistic in your plot/situation?
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Post by Gianna on Jul 12, 2019 9:48:48 GMT -5
Early in the season I always have to hand pollinate the squash or there is no fruit set. Eventually the bees show up, but not nearly as many in years past. I currently have a nice clump of Scabiosa blooming right outside the window - in the afternoon, there are visible bees working them.
This area is surrounded by avocado groves. There are resident bee hives the orchards keep. We get the benefits of those, and are fortunate. Occasionally a swarm flies over.
That said, bee colonies are in jeopardy across the country. Colony collapse, or whatever it's called. Mites, pesticides, climate change, mono-cultures ?? Probably more than one cause.
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Post by Laura_in_FL on Jul 12, 2019 10:04:45 GMT -5
I am not seeing many bees here, either. The bee situation seems to be getting worse rather than better as the season goes on. There are still wasps, but fewer of those than I am used to as well.
I think it is a combination of people continuing to remove the dead/dying trees from last fall's storm, plus a lot of older structures are being torn down or repaired. So there are a lot fewer places for bees and wasps to live.
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Post by spacecase0 on Jul 12, 2019 23:18:59 GMT -5
in previous years I have sometimes needed to hand pollinate. but this year there are plenty of pollinators
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Post by Deleted on Jul 13, 2019 21:51:05 GMT -5
I have given no thought to hand pollination---impractable in my case. I know that there were been in a big walnut tree destroyed in the park across from me last year.
My intent is to get a swarm of bees and then provide box hollows for possible wild bees. There is little old-growth timber here for bee trees.
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Post by farmerjack41 on Jul 14, 2019 10:20:18 GMT -5
Have lavender planted around the place in numerous spots. The bees seem to really like that. Plants are crawling with them.
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Post by paquebot on Jul 14, 2019 11:54:22 GMT -5
Problem with honeybees is that they will work only one type of blossom at a time. That will be the one with the most nectar. If you have just a few squash or pumpkin plants, there;e not enough nectar to warrant frequent visitations. If 15-20 flowers were open at the same time, then there could be a steady stream of bees coming and going. In the meantime, a single cucumber vine with a few blossoms would be totally ignored. Where I gardened for several years was also a pumpkin farm. There were 3 hives which were kept very busy with sometimes 3 or 4 bees working the same large pumpkin blossom. Dandelions and white clover in adjoining large lawn were totally ignored.
Martin
The truth is more important than the facts.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 15, 2019 13:35:18 GMT -5
I started keeping bees when I was about thirteen years old. I bought my boxes from Sears, cut trees in the woods for bees and their honey, brought the bees home and eventually bought gentle queens, again from Sears.
Except for time in the army, and in school, I continued bee-keeping until I had to leave Oklahoma. In all my bee keeping until around the turn of the century my worse experience was an occasional invasion of web worms, and one, just one in a lifetime, case of foulbrood.
It went downhill when the two aggressive bee mites arrived, and now something the know-it-alls call colony collapse to escape identifying the culprit/s.
As to foraging; a strong colony will work whatever is handy. If there are twenty thousand foragers in a colony (and there are likely more in a good colony) some will be working one plant, others another. Successful hunters come in with pollen and nectar and lead some others back to the source. If the hive is in need of pollen to raise young bees they may have half the hive working pumpkins or squash. If white clover is in bloom there will be thousands of foragers working there. The organization of a bee hive is far more complicated than the casual observer can tell.
I certainly hope that the USDA bans the colony collapse agents; the bees and beekeepers will solve the mites problem.
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Post by paquebot on Jul 15, 2019 19:21:32 GMT -5
Good bee report, Ox, except that they get more than pollen off the pumpkins and squash. We have some big pumpkin patches around here and beekeepers station a lot of hives there. One bottles the pumpkin honey separate. It's a light amber with a trace of pollen. I think that it is slightly waxy but otherwise mild.
Martin
The truth is more important than the facts.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 16, 2019 8:02:36 GMT -5
Not many pumpkin patches around my stomping grounds, Martin, so I plead ignorance. I do know that the few squash and pumpkins plants I've seen had bee visitors in plenty. Watermelon---I will never place bees in a melon patch again---they do all the work but get little honey.
Soybeans are an "iffy" situation--some varieties make good honey, some make almost nothing. Give me a field of purple vetch and I am one happy beekeeper. Belly-high white or yellow clover the same. The "invasive" Chinese tallow tree, black locust on a mountain, Elm trees in early spring, a hundred trees I know little about will all make bees happy.
I am not proud of fruit trees; orchard owners tend to spray with little regard for bees even if they've begged beekeepers to put hives under their trees. I've had all that I want too; a friend lost every hive he'd placed in a peach orchard. Being downwind of an orchard under spray is not good.
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Post by paquebot on Jul 16, 2019 10:30:12 GMT -5
Where I gardened in 2016 and 2017 was at the Prairie Pumpkin Patch. There were roughly 8 acres of pumpkins there and several more of squash. There were 3 hives for pollination. At times there may have been 3 or 4 bees working the same large pumpkin blossom. The lawn next to the garden had dandelions and white clover, both of which were totally ignored. One of the early flows was a large crabapple tree. At its peak time, one could stand under the tree and it was as if it were humming. They were less than 2 miles away from my home but there was so much nectar flow from the fields that the bees didn't have to look anywhere else. I had some of the honey and it was definitely nearly pure pumpkin.
Martin
The truth is more important than the facts.
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Post by Laura_in_FL on Jul 16, 2019 11:00:41 GMT -5
And down here in Florida, the bees loooooove citrus trees when they are in bloom. When I had a big satsuma tree, when it was in bloom it would be humming just as Martin described.
Orange blossom honey is really nice, too. I have never kept bees, but I really like orange blossom honey - I strongly prefer it to clover honey.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 20, 2019 11:51:49 GMT -5
I've tasted O blossom honey, and I agree that it is delicious--but no orangess in my woods, so vetch was the favorite.
I had to travel this week, so picked up a bee hive with wax drawn, will try to preserve and fill it in the coming year. Also picked up the steel needed to may my raised bed end pieces.
Gone four days and the garden looks like a jungle.
Reports from friends who planted the Israeli melons and lemon cukes: One lost all melons to cut worms but has cucumer plants growing. I and the other friend have our plants and all seem to be thriving, putting on seconds sets of leaves, getting ready to run.
Reports on the lemon cukes is that they are climbers, more so than rgular cukes. We will see.
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Post by octave1 on Jul 20, 2019 12:44:10 GMT -5
In my garden I see the highest number of honey bees in the zucchini blossoms. Bees love them, and as a matter of fact, I noticed no honey bees around until the zucchini plants started to produce flowers. Two more plants that attract dozens of honey bees are oregano and zinnia. I have hundreds of Purple coneflowers and those are a bumble bee magnet. I do not seem to be lacking pollinators so far.
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Post by brownrexx on Jul 20, 2019 13:50:14 GMT -5
I really like orange blossom honey - I strongly prefer it to clover honey. Our 4 hives of honeybees died 2 years ago and we decided to quit raising bees and we sold all of our equipment to a local beekeeper. He sends his hives to FL in the winter to pollinate the orange crop so last year he gave us a jar of his orange blossom honey. It was pretty good but so much more mild and not nearly as flavorful as our honey. It's interesting but our honey is the best I have ever tasted and I don't just say that because it was ours. It was made from a mixture of flowers from all over my property and including my garden plants as well as clover and pear trees. It's amazing how good the flavor was from using a huge variety of different flowers, even asparagus although asparagus honey would probably not sell too well!
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Post by paquebot on Jul 20, 2019 14:00:35 GMT -5
It was pretty good but so much more mild and not nearly as flavorful as our honey. That doesn't sound like orange blossom honey. I've had it a few times and would not call it mild. It should actually taste "orangey". Martin The truth is more important than the facts.
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Post by Hensaplenty on Jul 20, 2019 15:37:55 GMT -5
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Post by pepperhead212 on Jul 21, 2019 0:45:45 GMT -5
Hensaplenty I am going to attempt to get some mason bees. I have to build something to hold the housing tubes, but it's a small project, compared to the bat house! I'll post my results.
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Post by carolyn on Jul 21, 2019 7:40:35 GMT -5
I rely on bumbles and other pollinators more than honey bees as pollinators here. even though I have honey bees I never or rarely see them on my garden plants or fruit plants. they only work one source of nectar at a time and there has to be a large amount of it to do so. they will fly up to 3 miles for that source. The best honey from here locally that I have harvested is the black locust honey. very light and just a great flavor. I was helping a friend extract one day and as you extract you are constantly tasting the honey....because and every box might appear to be a different color indicating a different nectar source. One box was a little bit darker but not like buckwheat dark more like toast.... it was HORRIBLE honey. it tasted like the smell of musty dirty socks. it was the worst honey I had ever tasted. I spit it out. the only thing I could think of that it might have been was black walnut.
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Post by Laura_in_FL on Jul 21, 2019 7:59:44 GMT -5
Hensaplenty, the information and links you posted about the mason bees are really useful. This sounds like a good fall/winter project so I can get a house set up for mason bees and other native bees before spring.
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Post by Laura_in_FL on Jul 21, 2019 8:03:09 GMT -5
carolyn, it's hard to imagine honey tasting that bad and smelling of musty socks. Ewwww! I know you're glad you tasted the honey from that box. What a disaster if it had been mixed in with all of the other good honey and made it all unusable. EDIT: brownrexx, my second-favorite* honey is wildflower honey; I like it even better than orange blossom honey. So I definitely can understand why you prefer your own honey to the orange honey. I get raw wildflower honey from Florida sources whenever it's available. But admittedly I have not had the chance to taste some of the other honeys that people rave about. *My favorite honey is the (really expensive) Kiawe honey, a.k.a. Hawaiian white honey. But I haven't had any of that in years.
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Post by carolyn on Jul 21, 2019 8:05:38 GMT -5
carolyn , it's hard to imagine honey tasting that bad and smelling of musty socks. Ewwww! I know you're glad you tasted the honey from that box. What a disaster if it had been mixed in with all of the other good honey and made it all unusable. uh huh! never tasted anything like it. another box was a different flavor and oh my was it ever fabulous but no idea what to think it came from...
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Post by brownrexx on Jul 21, 2019 9:26:20 GMT -5
When we had bees I found them all over my garden plants and they also had a direct route to the small water lotus container that is beside the house. They would sit on the leaves and get drinks and it was funny but if you walked past the lotus container quite often a bee would bump into you as it was flying towards the pot or away from it. They never stung us, they just bumped into us and then flew away. I mainly didn't like if they bumped into my face but it was interesting to see them flying from the hive area, then across the driveway and to the water which was about 100 feet away. We no longer have bees but my neighbor about 1/2 mile away has multiple hives and is probably his bees all over my yard and plants but I see lots of honeybees. This morning I noticed another pollinator that I never considered before - the white cabbage butterfly. We think of these as "bad bugs" but they are all over my oregano flowers this morning and I am sure that they pollinate a lot of other flowers too. I never thought of them as pollinators before. carolyn , I wonder if that particular frame had some moldy pollen in it? I never experienced a taste like that either.
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Post by paquebot on Jul 21, 2019 11:05:40 GMT -5
brownrexx, if you suddenly get in front of their normal flight path, they may bump into you if you are within 4 or 5 feet. Step back to 6 feet and they will zig around you. They program their flight plan in a precise route and have to suddenly change it. If there isn't time, it's a whoops moment for them. I have run into that dark honey which Carolyn described. I took it to the local beekeeper and he could not identify it. All he could say was that it was honey but far from good honey. Martin The truth is more important than the facts.
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Post by carolyn on Jul 21, 2019 13:53:13 GMT -5
carolyn , I wonder if that particular frame had some moldy pollen in it? I never experienced a taste like that either. no mold no pollen. it was just disgusting.
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