North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["William C. Garthright" <billg@inebraska.com>]

> For those of you who are not seeing bees yet, we have had a very cool month 
> here in Tennessee. ..., and I just can't get squash and cucumber seeds to 
> come up.


Hmm,... maybe the late spring is my problem, too. I figured I'd just 
done something wrong. I tried planting squash, cucumbers, and even some 
watermelon seeds, but almost nothing sprouted - only the zucchinis (but 
not the yellow squash).


> Following the Big Easter Freeze last year we had reduced numbers of paper 
> wasps, very few yellowjackets at all, and zero baldfaced hornets.


I wouldn't have been surprised at low numbers of bees after last year, 
since we had nothing at all blooming for weeks after that hard April 
freeze. But some of my blue orchard bees did survive, somehow, and I had 
a lot of nesting tubes filled by the end of the season. I also had lots 
of leaf-cutter bees filling the tubes. I kept the tubes in the 
refrigerator for the winter, so I don't know what I did wrong, but very 
few ever emerged. I've got maybe 3 tubes filled so far this year, and 
I'm still seeing very few bees.

Something is pollinating my strawberries quite well, but the fruit trees 
were another story. My Northstar sour cherry was a mass of blossoms, but 
the number of cherries set is rather disappointing. Oh, well, my trees 
are all pretty young yet.

Bill
Lincoln, NE (zone 5)

--
When I want hard-hitting news, I turn to CNN,... who turns to Skippy the 
Bush Kangaroo. - Jon Stewart