# Articles on the effectiveness of honey bee pollination?



## bluegrass (Aug 30, 2006)

There are plenty for mono-crops, but I am not sure you will find any for small gardens. Part of the problem is that if there is a better source of nectar/pollen in the area of your small garden they are not going to touch the garden. With a mono-crop the crop is all that is available for miles and miles.... so that is what they pollinate.


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## SRatcliff (Mar 19, 2011)

Makes sense I suppose. There are just a lot of people in my area with small gardens, and I was trying to come up with some information for them to get them interested in bees. Last fall we did pumpkins, I had 3 hives about 100 yards away, and there were always like 4-5 honey bees in each bloom. Obviously they weren't ALL mine, but its hard to think that having bees doesn't always have SOME impact on your pollination.


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## BuzzyBuzz (Mar 21, 2012)

Perhaps you could talk generally about the kinds of crops and plants pollinated by bees - and if people grow any of these crops in their gardens, having bees around will help - at the end of the day, farmers hire bee hives for a reason! 

A couple of links:
http://www.aces.uiuc.edu/vista/html_pubs/BEEKEEP/CHAPT8/chapt8.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crop_plants_pollinated_by_bees


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

I don't know if there are studys and reports available, but, keep in mind that in every colony of bees there are "renegade bees" or "rebel bees" which go where no other bee goes so when the predominant source of pollen, nectar, water, or propolis runs dry the colony has another source. These renegade or rebel bees do the incidental pollination needed to move pollen around in a garden plot. Though, if you could mark the bees found on tomatoes, you might find them only working the tomatoes.

I took twoo hundred colonys of bees to a Blueberry Grower w/ about 160 acres of blueberries, this Spring. He talked w/ me about the bumblebees he had in the past and the native pollinators that live nearby. He knows and understands the role plkayed by all of the bees and sees managed colonys of honeybees as extra insurance of a good, well pollinated, crop of blueberries.

So, my point is, that keeping a hive or two of honeybees in or near a garden will help suppliment the native pollinators and help produce better looking vegetables, more usable vegetables.

Honeybees don't make a crop, they make the crop better. Sweeter fruit. More lbs to the square foot.

If one sets a yd of bees in an orange grove, one can tell how far away from the hives the yd foraged because of the drop off in sugar content in the oranges. According to what an orange grower in FL told me once. So, I imagine that follows w/ other crops as well.


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