Bees and Pollination - a team effort

Bees and pollination go hand-in-hand. They are one of the greatest natural team efforts in vegetable gardening, and essential if you're growing "fruit" type vegetables like squash, cucumbers, and tomatoes.

There is hardly a harder working member of your vegetable gardening team than the bumble bee. They will go about harvesting nectar from your vegetable blossoms and pollinate your entire garden, tirelessly, for weeks and weeks on end.

With greenhouse gardening, you'll want to accommodate these buzzing team players by opening doors and vents until they find their way inside. Once they're familiar with where the blossoms are, they find their way back each day to pollinate your plants.

One of my favorite things to watch are bumble bees as they go about pollinating my summer and winter squash plants. They venture down deep into the flowers and get themselves completely covered in pollen, then dutifully go off to the next blossom in concert with other bumble bees that have the same idea.

Sometimes they'll stop to rest on a leaf and clean themselves off. If both male and female flowers are present on my squash plants, and I have a few visiting bumble bees, I don't bother to hand pollinate anymore. They are much better at that than I am.

Bees and pollination have a little competition with flies as they go about searching for food. Flies are reasonably good pollinators, if my chive and thyme plants are any indicators. Blossoms from these plants are often heavily covered with flies walking about the blossoms in search of food.

Butterflies and moths also help pollinate our plants, but they also tend to bring with them larvae that we don't necessarily welcome. If you see cabbage butterflies, you'll soon see cabbage worms. The same holds true for tomato worms, but you don't often see the Hawk Moth responsible for those large hornworms that can shred a tomato plant in just a few days.

One approach to promoting bees and pollination of your vegetables is to plant flowers alongside of and near your vegetable gardening areas. Even if that means growing flowers inside your greenhouse, you'll be glad you did when your needs for pollination are satisfied by the many bees that come to visit.

Happy vegetable gardening, and good fortune in your quest to promote bees inside your greenhouse and throughout your garden, as these are the best natural pollinators you could possible hope for.

Done with Bees and Pollination, take me back to Pollination