1/31/08 Blue Bee Part 2

Blue Bee Part 2. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. The blue orchard bee is a U.S. native that particularly likes to pollinate apple, cherry, apricot and almond trees. With the problems associated with the honeybee and the colony collapse disorder, the blue bee is being utilized by more and more orchardists. According to Dr. Theresa Pitts-Singer with USDA's Agricultural Research Service, they are working on ways to get the bees to emerge at bloom. PITTS-SINGER: They have to have enough heat to hatch out. And also when you have them hatch out, you want them to hatch out all at once so that the crop can get pollinated when the flowers are in bloom which is only like 3 weeks so if they are just kind of trickling out then the pollinators, which are the females, will come out not at the best time. They have developed a special box to help coax the young bees out of their cocoons. PITTS-SINGER: But the problem is if you let them hatch out kind of not in their natural setting they tend to fly away from the area. They'll disperse. And so the best case scenario is to have them in their nest which for us is in a paper straw so that they're in their nest cavity and they hatch out kind of in their own way and they crawl through this debris and stuff in there and fly out and it's like home sweet home. They have been working with almond orchardists in California to place these "bee warming and emergence boxes" so the bees will hatch and be ready when the trees are ready to pollinate. The blue bees tend to be better pollinators than the typical honey bee. PITTS-SINGER: The blue orchard bee kind of attacks the flower, lands on it and moves around on it and the way it collects pollen it makes it more efficient at spreading the pollen from cultivar to cultivar, flower to flower and it's a higher transfer of pollen in the ways it makes it a better pollinator for crops. Tomorrow we wrap up our discussion of the blue bee. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.