Correction #487

Although I haven’t documented the other 486 errors, I feel confident that any middle school biology teacher would be able to find every one. However, I managed to find error 487 myself, and I’d like to correct it. Remember, way back when (aka 3 days ago), when I was cheering on the bees because the tomato and green bean plants had been pollinated? Yeah. Turns out, bees weren’t involved, or they might have been, but they weren’t necessary.

Here’s the deal. Some plants have male and female flowers, like squash and cucumbers, but some plants, such as tomato and bean plants, have complete flowers. The squash and cucumber variety need a pollinator, usually a bee, to transport the pollen from the male flower to the pistil of the female flower, and only female flowers result in fruit. However, plants with complete flowers have the male and female parts in the same flower, so they all make fruit once pollinated. All they need to produce fruit is a good shake from the wind usually, or from an insect nosing around the flower looking for nectar. With all the wind we’ve been having lately, it’s no wonder there are a zillion MiniTomatoes and MiniBeans on the farm…

As you can imagine, I was doing a fair amount of Farmer Worrying about this pollination situation, especially due to the rise of Colony Collapse Disorder as Dr. J so timely mentioned. If you’re not familiar with that crisis, I’ll refer you this official summary of the issue from the USDA for technical information. The short version, however, is the following: bee hives with CCD are full of juvenile honey bees and queens, but no adults. As anyone who has spent ten minutes with an adolescent knows, thousands of adolescents without adults in charge does not lead to much work getting done/honey being produced. Also, and most worrying, no one knows where the adult bees went (though worry not--your cell phone isn't to blame). Maybe their internal GPS systems got out of sync and they can't find the hive, or maybe they died somewhere. But the bottom line is that we're about to see a shortage of pollinators, and that is not good for vegetable growers. Now that I know about the complete flower situation, I’ll stop worrying about the tomatoes and beans, but I still might need to get out the q-tip and hand-pollinate the cucumbers and squash.

Farm Vitals
Yesterday's high: 82F
Yesterday's low: 64F
Warnings: farmer with a Q-tip alert
Mood of the farm: there's a lot of elbowing going on...
Reason to consider a new career: this Farmer may not be smarter than a 5th grader