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Subject: Orange County, NC Beekeepers

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: Randall Austin <ra41717 AT gmail.com>
  • To: Chris and Lisa Laudeman <chrisandlisa AT laudeman.com>
  • Cc: "ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org" <ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [ocba] Pollen from wind-pollinated plants
  • Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2016 13:13:23 -0400

Chris,

In John Lovell's Honey Plants of North America (1926), he has a chapter entitled, "Plants valuable only for pollen". These are plants that don't use nectar to entice bees because they are wind polllinated. However the pollen is attractive and useful nutrition for the bees.

Just a few of the examples Lovell discusses as good providers of pollen to bees are elms, oaks, walnut and chestnut. Many of these trees also indirectly provide honeydew when aphids feed on them.

About grasses, Lovell writes:
"This is an immense family comprising some 3000 species, and including the edible cereals, corn, wheat, rye, barley, oats, rice, and millet.... The small greenish flowers are produced in countless numbers, and cross-pollination is effected only through the agency of the wind. An immense quantity of pollen is set free; but, except in the case of Indian corn, it is seldom gathered by bees. There are about 429 species in North America."

About corn specifically, Lovell writes:
"Corn is wind-pollinated, the 'spindle' or 'tassel' being composed of staminate flowers, and the 'ear,' of pistillate flowers. It produces no nectar, but is frequently visited by multitudes of bees for pollen."

Corn pollen is relatively low in protein and therefore isn't very good bee food. Corn often blooms during the summer dearth; that probably explains its appeal.

About beekeeping in Piedmont North Carolina, Lovell writes:
"The middle portion of the state ... has a poorer honey flora [than the west or east].... The surplus honey is obtained chiefly from tulip tree, sourwood, crimson clover, white and alsike clover. Other plants of value are willow, dandelion, goldenrod, aster, persimmon, holly, fruit bloom, maple, black gum, boneset, sumac and cowpeas."

Orange County is not very agricultural at all (hay and cattle are our big money crops, and we don't really do much with those compared to other counties). We certainly don't suffer from a "monoculture ecosystem" -- travel to Mississippi or Kansas to get a view of the monoculture ecosystems that are potentially harmful to bees (thousands of acres with nothing but the same variety of plants, giving only one type of pollen, followed by nothing at all once they bloom). We don't have many, if any, fields in Orange County that are even big enough for the harvesters that they use in the midwest to turn around in. In southern Orange, ornamentals obviously make up a large part of summer bee forage. The plants Lovell mentioned in 1929 are still widely established today.

You may be interested in the attached graph that shows pollen counts broken down by trees, grasses and weeds, that I put together for a paper I wrote several years ago. It is the trees and weeds that are important for us as beekeepers. The small bump in the blue line in the fall coincides with the goldenrod and aster bloom that we depend on for winter stores.



Randall

On 3/22/2016 10:18 AM, Chris and Lisa Laudeman wrote:
To what extend do bees forage pollen from wind-blown pollinators, e.g. grasses, oaks?




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