how to certain plants pollinate?
Question by bobyjdizle: how to certain plants pollinate?
cucumbers and squash need bees to pollinate, so how do massive cucumber and squash farms get their product pollinated? also, does wheat and rice need to pollinate?
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2 Responses to how to certain plants pollinate?
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when bees and and birds and animals touch/land on plants they collect the pollen
Sarah
March 13, 2013 at 7:55 pm
Those that require a pollinator usually hire a bee keeper and his bees for the season, or the farmer himself has hives.
(Interestingly, in the present, many of our fruits, veggies and trees that require a pollinator are having difficulties, since a new disease has sprung up call Colony Collapse Disorder, in which bees just fly off, and never return. No one has figured this out yet— whether it is viral, inbreeding of bees, a bacteria or something that is carried by parasites on bees or a combination of several things…. a real puzzle.
My dad kept bees for his whole life, (he was born just before WWI) and would loved to have had a chance to figure that one out. (He was a doctor, and in part put himself thru med school with his earnings from selling honey since he had been a child… I was raised with bees, but don’t have any now. You may wish to read about Colony Collapse Disorder
As well, before cultured bees were kept, pollination was done by native, solitary bees, but with the introduction of cultured bees, many of those don’t have numbers large enough to work for a farmer. (My dad kept German and French bred bees….. tamer than the invasive African bee, which escaped from an experimental lab in Brazil in the late 1950’s and now have migrated up into the US by now. I live in S. Arizona, and they are here… and can be nasty. You may wish to Google some of this stuff…. hugely interesting.)
As for the grain crops you listed, those are wind pollinated. There are other pollinators besides bees…. bats pollinate flowers of the Sahuaro cactus, and moths pollinate flowers of orchids living in the tropics.
Hope this helps?
ladyren
March 13, 2013 at 8:43 pm