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  • From: "John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Sampling of bee and other pollinator sightingsthis year by list subscribers wherever you are.
  • Date: Sun, 6 May 2012 23:13:25 +0100


I'm glad that things look better for you than for us Ute. We won't even have any top fruit this year because the apples, pears and plums never set flowers. Probably because of the high NE winds and the unseasonal temperatures. We still had night frost last week. The trees are fully leafed out by now and no flowers or set fruit to be seen. Can't blame lack of pollinators for that.

And I am also hopefull since you had a feral beeswarm. We here have not seen a swarm like that in the last three years. I blame our local beekeepers for that who all practice queenless splitting to keep their emptying hives populated. They also get rid of drone cells because drones don't pay the rent according to them which means that quite a few mating flights of virgin queens end up infertile.
As to the bumble bees, I have only seen two species of the five we normally have with about 90% of them belonging to the one species.

How are your swallows doing?

John

We have plenty of bumblebees feeding on all our flowering trees and shrubs (soft
fruit, top fruit, Eleagnus, willows etc.), social wasps, and a healthy hive of
bees - a feral swarm that moved into an old hive last year.
Farming around us is grass-based cattle and sheep, no tillage.
There is not much pesticide use, except some ignorant people spray roadside
margins, yards etc. and some farmers
spray roundup prior to ploughing-up and re-seeding grassland. Neonicotinoids
are thankfully not an issue around us. The evidence that this class of
pesticides is at least in part responsible for CCD is pretty damning though.

Ute in mid-West Ireland.

Saturday, May 5, 2012, 11:38:15 PM, you wrote:

JDh> I'd say about 20 % of the bumble bees we had last year at this time. No
JDh> honey bees at all and even wasps that seem to normally pollinate our goose
JDh> berries are extremely rare.
JDh> That is not all. 5 days ago three (3) swallows arrived here out of the 70 or
JDh> so that left the farm last September. Four weeks late and no others have
JDh> come back so far.
JDh> John in SW Ireland

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