From:                   Tim Morris <[log in to unmask]>


> I was chatting with a fellow after Church today and was informed that
> people around here recognize the need for pollination, but refuse to pay
> for it. At least the beekeepers he knew of were doing it for "free"
> claiming the honey produced as the payment.

    It's pretty much driven by local conditions and markets. In south
Florida, for example, for winter veggies, tangelos, etc, it's done
cheap to free, because there are beekeepers looking for wintering
locations (done that myself...)

   Here in South Carolina, we do mostly vine crops. Cukes, squash
and watermelon yield negligible nectar, so no one would hang
around here if they weren't paid. Drip irrigated cantaloupes will
make a shallow super of dark, but nice-flavored honey, which is
better than nothing, if your bees are stuck here anyway. The
farmers know that when the weather gets hot, the bees mostly go to
the mountains or north, so there won't be any bees for pollination
unless they pay for them. Rates run around $40 - 45.

   One point you might make in discussions with farmers, is that
beekeepers might stock hives at a certain rate for honey production,
but this is nowhere near enough for optimum pollination.  Read
Harry Whitcomb's "Bees are My Business" for a good explanation of
how the principle came to be understood. You can run an online
search of the used book market to find a copy if you don't have one.
It's long out of print, but I recently bought one for $8 plus shipping.

   Another point is that many growers, and even many beekeepers
do not realize that pollination is cumulative, until all the seeds are
fertilized. We are guilty of very fuzzy thinking when we talk of fruit
being "set," because that fruit may still be junk, if it's only partly
pollinated. They may have gotten enough seeds fertilized so the
apple will hang on the tree til harvest, but not enough to get on the
fancy fruit counter, where the profits are made. A few more bees
visits to deliver a few more grains of pollen, would have made a
major difference. Check out the pollination page for more on this, if
you don't understand. Growers need to understand that good
pollination does more than make fruit; it is essential for QUALITY
fruit.

   Small growers may not ever get in on the game, but lack of
pollination is one reason the small growers are going out. Big
growers use bees much better. If you don't have any big veggie or
fruit growers in the area, you might not ever have a pollination
market.  Twenty years ago we had at least 60 cucumber growers in
this area. Now we are down to about a dozen, with three of them
accounting for the majority of the acreage. Small growers have
gone out, in part, because they brought a lot of poorly pollinated
knots and curls to the cucmber shed, and these got sorted out into
the waste bins. (Labor problems are the other main reason. When
the kids and grandkids refused to pick cukes anymore, the small
growers weren't able to pick up migrant help, like the big growers.)

   I'm curious as to another question. With the price of honey up, are
there very many beekeepers doing pollination who will abandon
their customers, to go after bigger honey crops?  Pollination
customers essentially compete with honey production for
beekeepers attention. If a lot of beekeepers bail out of pollination,
this could create a domino effect on some growers who are already
in a shaky position (same story as beekeepers have long dealt with
- cheap imports taking their markets).  When the price of honey
drops (as it inevitably must) and beekeepers go back for pollination,
will the growers be there?

    I guess what I'm saying is that the sudden spike in honey price
may overly inflence the pollination market to our long-term
detriment.


Dave Green
The Pollination Home Page:  http://pollinator.com

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