Photo courtesy of jamiemccarthy at Flickr.com.
Anyone who’s ever grown squash knows that many of the baby squashes never mature, simply because their flowers — which are female — don’t get fertilized by the neighboring male flowers during the day or two the flowers are in bloom. Because most squash flowers are surrounded by leaves and are close to the ground, they can’t really depend on the wind to blow the pollen around. You can either get down there with a tiny paintbrush and help them along, or borrow a beehive. This offers a perfectly natural, organic solution to your pollination problem, and you don’t even have to get on your knees to handle it. While you can always hope wild bees will do the job, in the last few years bee populations have become increasingly scarce due to Colony Collapse Disorder.
The borrowed bees will be happy to efficiently pollinate your garden plants for you, and the owner of the hive will get free honey and other bee products out of it. If you can’t find a beekeeper who’ll let you borrow a hive, you may be able to rent one. Incidentally, this process works well not just for squash, but for just about any other insect pollinated crop: beans, fruit, beets, cucumbers, tomato, watermelon…the list goes on and on.
Photo courtesy of Laurie York at Flickr.com.
