Can farmers make bees pollinate their crops

How do farmers make sure there are enough bees to pollinate their crops?

In rural areas, local bees pollinate the flowers during the growing season, rotating from one species to another as each one comes into bloom and finding enough nectar to sustain the colony. Smaller farmers often arrange with local beekeepers to locate their hives on or near the farmer's property to improve their access to the pollinators. Farmers who want to encourage bee pollination try to provide continuous blooming by planting a variety of native species so the local bees can flourish, and they limit or stop the use of pesticides and lawn herbicides.

Huge commercial farms that grow only one crop (monoculture) cannot attract enough local bees to provide sufficient pollination when their crop is in bloom, and when the blooming season is over the farm has nothing growing to provide forage to sustain the bees. This has become an environmental issue as the number of commercial monoculture farms has increased, and the solution has taken the form of commercial beekeepers who migrate around the country with trucks full of hives, moving their bees to wherever there is a seasonal crop that needs pollinating. Commercial pollination has become a $14.6 billion business, according to figures obtained in 2008. Blue bottle flies and leaf cutter bees are also raised and sold for managed pollination.

When bees are rearing large quantities of brood, they temporarily focus on gathering pollen to provide protein for the larvae. Although the transfer of pollen is always unintentional, a honey bee that is deliberately gathering pollen is up to ten times more efficient as a pollinator than one that is primarily gathering nectar, so commercial beekeepers try to manage their hives so that the bees are in this pollen-gathering state when their "money" crops are in bloom.

Close to one million honey bee hives are needed in California in the spring when the almond orchards are in bloom. The apple trees in New York require about thirty thousand hives, and the blueberry crop in Maine requires about fifty thousand hives each year. Other crops that are raised on monoculture farms that import beehives are cucumbers, melons, squash, blueberries, and strawberries. Tomatoes and other crops raised primarily in greenhouses use bumble bees for buzz pollination.

How much weight in pollen can a bee carry?

A worker honey bee has rows of hairs on the inner surface of her hind leg which serve as a pollen basket. She has a structure on her leg that serves as a comb, and she uses it to scrape pollen from the body hairs and to transport the pollen grains to the basket. In other bees, such as the Megachilid, or leaf cutters, the females have special pollen hairs (scopal) on the underside of the abdomen that are very effective at attracting pollen, which they transport to their nest. A load of pollen carried by a bee is not as heavy as the weight of an average nectar load. Typical studies tend to measure how far bees carry the pollen, patterns of pollen deposition, and the rate of successful pollination, but we know of no contemporary studies weighing honey bee loads.

In Gustavo Romero and Craig Nelson's research on pollination of Catasetum ochraceum orchids, they reported that the flowers released their pollen sacs onto the backs of visiting "orchid" bees (also called euglossine bees) and that the pollen load could weigh as much as a quarter of the bee's known bodyweight (they determined this by weighing the pollen sacs). The bees reacted to this experience by becoming averse to visiting these orchids again, suggesting that the bees found carrying this amount of pollen to be uncomfortable or distasteful.

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