We have lots of busy bees in the garden these days (and we
don’t just mean our daughters)! We
really mean the bees – our honeybees.
Without them, we wouldn’t have much of a harvest. You could call them our garden
superheroes, born with the power of pollination!
Almost any plant where the fruit or the seeds are eaten (instead of the leaves or the root) relies on pollination to get the food
production ball rolling. Some vegetables,
like tomatoes, beans and peas self-pollinate with a minimum of outside
intervention. They have male and female parts inside the same flower, so the pollen gets where it needs to go within a single bloom. Corn is pollinated by the
wind carrying pollen from the tassels on top down to the silk on an ear of
corn.
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| Zucchini Blossoms |
But vegetables like cucumbers, zucchini and other squash
can’t pollinate without insects, often bees. These
vines have separate male and female flowers on each plant, and rely on insects
to transfer the pollen from the male flowers to the female ones. Without ample bees or other insects to do
this important job, it’s up to the gardener to hand-pollinate the plants, using
a cotton swab to transfer the pollen between blooms. Frankly, we can think of a lot of things we’d
rather be doing than gender-typing blossoms and Q-tipping pollen. Weeding, getting eaten alive by deer flies, root
canal…
Nationwide, there’s an emerging pollination crisis because the honeybee population has been declining. Some enterprising folks have built good
businesses trucking hives of bees from one commercial crop producer to another
through the growing season. The bees pollinate
a few fields before packing up and heading off to the next stop, like a
honeybee midway carnival. Maybe that’s
what we’ll do when we retire. If you see
an RV pulling a trailer full of beehives in a few years, give a wave – it could
be the Kopp’s Crops Honeybee Carnival Caravan!
