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  • From: "William C. Garthright" <billg@inebraska.com>
  • To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [NAFEX] honeybees
  • Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 10:21:41 -0500


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




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