>I *have* to chuckle over that - no, there are no trade secrets, and in fact
I had sort of thought that by suggesting looking for native cucumber bees,
I might be helping you get interested in being the first person to *try* to
figure out how to integrate them into a commercial operation. If it worked,
you'd have a corner on the cuke pollination market!
 
>About the closest thing to a secret I can think of is that if you
were to find an area where these bees nest, you could dig up the
overwintering prepupae and transplant them to sandy soil near a cuke field.
 
   Okay, I did have my tongue in cheek, on trade secrets. (That does seem to
be the case with bumblebees.)   You can bet I'll put the best of my feeble
brainpower to work on this.  I don't know how I can find nesting sites if I
can't find the bees, but I'll keep looking.
 
 
>As long as the commercial plants are open when the bees are active, the
population should be self-sustaining, and slow-growing. I really don't see
a way to speed them up, given the way solitary bees operate (they collect
pollen faster than they can lay eggs on it, so giving them more plants
doesn't give them more offspring, like it does in social bees). That's
actually probably another reason they haven't been commercially developed -
no one is willing to wait five to ten years to build up a bee population.
 
  Because of several pathogens, root knot nematode being probably the primary
one, cucurbits are rarely raised on the same land two years in a row.  I have
one big farm that does, but they spend a fortune on fumigation each year.
 
   This proposes a dilemma right away, when you talk about a ground nesting
species that takes several years to build up.  Honeybees are easy to move.
 Thoughts?
 
   Have you done any work on the effect of the pesticide misuse situation on
wild bee populations?
 
   Honeybees do a fine job of cucurbit pollination, and I am skeptical of
solitary bees replacing them any time soon, unless we can't keep the
honeybees alive.  It is hard to outdo 20,000 of those little gals, just
itching to work.
 
   I would have little interest in solitary bees, except for a) an ecological
system with more variety is generally more healthy, b) honeybees are
threatened by new parasites and diseases, as well as loss of beekeepers.
 
   And c) if you are talking tomatoes or okra, or eggplant, that is a
different matter.  I have seen honeybees VIGOROUSLY work tomatoes once in my
life and the difference in yield was astounding.  Most of the time tomatoes
blossoms are barren of any pollinators.  Of course the pesticide situation is
a major factor here too.
 
>Out of curiosity, how long does the average farmer raise one crop? This is
America, land of the Quick Fix, after all. ;-)
 
   Well I've spent the best years of my life learning about, and working to
improve pollination of our crops.  I doubt we'll come up with too many quick
fixes, but we certainly could improve our management by a lot.
 
   Our cuke crops involve about 7 - 8 weeks.  In this area, we have a spring
and a fall crop.  Watermelons take a little longer.
 
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Dave Green,  PO Box 1215, Hemingway, SC  29554