At 08:04 PM 3/31/98 -0800, you wrote:
>A local avocado orchard grower is going to spray a bee phermone on his
>blossoming avocado orchard to attract more bees to the blossoms.
>Has anyone heard of this proceedure before?
>Would this be a viable project for other plant species?
 
Yep the sale of so called "bee attractants" is common in California and
well advertised in the farm press every few years and they are sold under
various trade names and list of ingredients. One must be a little careful
as sugar which can be one of the main ingredient in some of this stuff and
can have a bad effect on blossoms and young foliage. Anything that says it
contains pheromones has just found a way to increase the asking price for
it.
 
It works...farmers spend money on this they may/would have spent on
pesticides that kill bees. Sometimes the next week they use the same
equipment and stuff that the same salesman sold them to kill all bees and
any other living thing in the grove. Once you got your crop set who needs
bees anyway?
 
In the end the difference between those who use these so called bee
attractants does not measure up to a real crop gain and does NOT gain
enough extra crop to pay the cost in all but a very few cases which are
used to promote the sale of the material to the next progressive farmer.
 
If more bees are really needed it would be a better investment to pay some
beekeeper to bring more of them in then trying to attract them from who
knows ware. The problem is that this time of year most beekeepers are not
interested in alligator pears and the black honey they can make, as it is
Orange Blossom time and its white honey time, so if a grower does not have
orange locations or oranges around him he has a problem. Still I know of no
grower who wants bees and does not have them who can not rent bees or any
big or new demand for bees to pollinate this crop.
 
Bee Attractants have been used from time to time in many seed and nut crops
in California which include almonds, apples, alfalfa seed, red clover seed,
onion seed and even cotton seed. All it takes is a good flashy advertising
campaign and fast talking young collage graduates to push this stuff. They
must sell some as they continue to advertise it and sellers can be found at
every spring agricultural fair in California. All these farm chemicals are
no more then the farmers dope bag, he gets away with it because its
regulated while the poor in the getoe get to go to jail.
 
Bee extra careful around these growers they will arrest you for picking one
fallen fruit off the ground and laugh at you if you complain when their
irrigators rip honey off your hives..<G>
 
IMHO,  the OLd Drone
one who in another life bent his elbow with many
farm chemical people and use every dirty trick they
taught me to protect bees via the legislate and courts
 
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