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On a recent sunny day driving through the orchard on the golf cart with farmer Al, we stopped to admire a new planting of annual flowers that were in bloom. Blooms of a purplish blue hue were flooding the 20 acre field and the amount of bees buzzing above the field was remarkable. This is good news for farmers like us and for eaters like all of us who depend on the work of bees to pollinate the flowers of foods that we hope to harvest and to eat. About 30% of the crops we eat require cross pollination performed by bees.
The beautiful display of blooms and buzzing bees we observed that day is due to the work of UC Berkeley’s Urban Bee Lab with whom we’ve been partnering for several years to increase the population of native bees on our farm.
We were pleased to receive a grant from the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service to seed 20 acres of field with annual flowers. The area we seeded is adjacent to one of our cherry orchards in the interrows of our young mulberry trees that were planted last spring.
Our ground crew put in about 100lbs of Phacelia tanacetifolia, Eschscholzia californica (CA poppies), and Gilia capitata seeds. These annual flowers start blooming mid March and bloom through mid June. The flowers were selected because their bloom time corresponds with our peak pollination season and because the pollen and nectar of these flowers are resources that attract pollinators to the area. Once the pollinators are present and begin their feast, our cherry trees begin to flower and we have a healthy population of pollinators in place.
When the annuals have stopped flowering in June and have gone to seed, our ground crew will mow them down and the seeds will go into that field’s seed bank. Given enough rain the following winter, the seeds will germinate and will become new flowers the following spring. Thanks to all the rain we received this winter, the Bee Lab reports that they’ve seen annuals we planted in 2011 finally re-emerge this year after a long period of dormancy.
What happens to the bees once the annuals stop flowering? With the help of the Urban Bee Lab, we’ve established annual and perennial plantings throughout the orchard with various bloom times to ensure our pollinators have the resources they need in order to maintain healthy bee populations throughout the year.
