Obviously a different weather situation here in Georgia, but native
pollinators were more numerous this year during bloom of stone fruit
and earlier apple bloom, with temps in upper 70's and few days over
80. More bumblebees than last year and the usual contingent of what I
think are leaf-cutter wasps, which are very good pollinators, similar
in activity to a mason bee. All of these are very temperature/low
wind dependent early in the season...upper 70's, light wind, they do
a good job.
I became a beekeeper out of necessity years ago, and experimented
with adding a few bumblebee quads from Koppert in years when I
thought bee numbers might be light. At $400/quad they are not cheap,
but they do pollinate in some crappy weather. One year it was 38 with
wind, snow flurries during bloom (generally not a good omen) and they
were still out working within a 500 foot radius of the hive. Great
pollinators for early bloom. During my brief experiment with Apricots
and Pluots, they were very impressive pollinators, just dragging
their body across snowball bloom without any regard for individual
flowers. These days I just put in more honeybees and hope for good weather.
Looking for a thinning window here, except for some bloom left on
CrimsonCrisp and Gingergold. I need a system for thinning during
bloom on apples, either mechanically, with Wilthin, NAD, or some
other chemical that doesn't harm bees. Fruit growth from 12mm to 25mm
is so rapid in our climate that thinning windows are hard to come by.
I've been experimenting with Maxcel/carbaryl instead of NAA/carbaryl
with mixed results that could probably be improved with some form of
carbohydrate model. Have to rescue thin with Ethrel more than I would
like. I would be very interested in any thinning combinations/results
that could be applied without harming bees when some bloom remains on
trees that already contain 10mm fruit. In other words, early
combinations that don't involve Sevin. NAD?
David, nice planting of Asian pears. I see you went open center all
the way. I tried for that but couldn't get them to spread properly,
so mine are, shall we say, a little more horizontally challenged.
At 11:01 AM 5/2/2013, you wrote:
Another casualty of last year's freak weather is the population of
native pollinators - my asian pears entered full bloom over the last
48 hours - other years they are surrounded by a cloud of several
species of solitary pollinators, this year that activity is roughly
10% of what I am accustomed to observing -
The first apple bloom opened yesterday - 72 hours ago at tight
cluster I considered the amount of bloom as 'full' but not
particularly remarkable, now bloom has seemingly spontaneously
generated to an amount that I cannot remember observing in the past
- it's going to be spectacular, but has upped my anxiety about the
potential 'big crop of little green apples' - hope thinners are effective....
David Doud
grower IN
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Brian Heatherington
Beech Creek Farms and Orchards
2011 Georgia Highway 120
Tallapoosa, GA 30176
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