It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane….
Dear CSA Members,
At first I thought it was a humming bird! A deep loud whirring noise, I heard, while driving through the pear orchard. A light swoosh of air went by my ear as I was looking at the blossoms, assessing their stage of development to decide when to blow on the pollen.
As you know, we have to mechanically apply pollen on the Warrens to get a decent crop. That’s because bees aren’t very attracted to pears in general, and they definitely aren’t interested in the Warrens, which are very low on the desirability list for bees! So every year we buy frozen pollen from a company up in Washington whose sole mission is to collect pollen by hand, freeze it, then deliver it “next day air”, frozen, to farmers like me who have unusual pollination challenges. They also sold us the handy-dandy little machine called the “scumby puffer”. We mount it on the flat bed of one of our electric golf carts, then we “go and blow” 60 grams per acre of this precious “gold dust.” It’s actually more expensive than gold… 1000 grams of it will set me back about $6000.00. The frustrating thing about it is that no matter how hard I try to see the pollen coming out of the puffer and getting up into the trees, I can never quite get a glimpse of it; it’s just too fine. It’s really tricky to apply it; the timing has to be just right – the moment of maximum receptivity for the majority of the blossoms we’re trying to pollinate. And there cannot be any wind! No air movement at all or the pollen will not float up into the trees. It’s lighter than dust. Lucky for us, these 2 critical conditions are convergent this year. Oh yes, that “hummingbird” was actually a carpenter bee… the females, are big, black, shiny and beautiful. They fly around just like a humming bird, zipping around from flower to flower. Maybe we don’t need pollen as much as we think…! Regards,