A few years ago, while working on Protect Your Pollinators for Mother Earth News, I was humbled by my naivety about bees.
Yes, honeybees are great all-round pollinators, but when it comes to native fruits like blueberries, native bees are better. And it's no wonder! If you take a close look, you'll see that blueberry blossoms are tight little bells too small for honeybees to enter.
In addition to crawling around inside the flower, honeybee style, native blue orchard bees and bumblebees provide pollination services via "sonication" - purposeful buzzing of blossoms that shakes out a small reward for the bees. Both Michigan State and Maine Extension have excellent guides for conservation of these and other native bees, some of whom are also major pollinators of strawberries and squash.
But I'm not bashing honeybees! After 3 days of cool rain, I'm hoping that a sunny afternoon gets them flying, because the apples are in full bloom. According to Dr. Marla Spivak of the University of Minnesota, "Pollination is the most critical event in the yearly production cycle of apples."
Fortunately, the bramble thickets out back make great habitat for solitary Osmia species, which fly at lower temperatures than honeybees, and a neighbor through the woods keeps beehives. On a brisk spring day, it takes only a few rays of warm sun to get a corps of pollinators working.
