Encouraging Native Pollinators
One of the joys of pruning blueberries in the spring is listening to the incessant buzz of native pollinators doing their 'work' in the field. Pollinators are a critical component of blueberry production.
When people talk about "Save The Bees!" they usually mean one specific bee: the European Honey Bee. In the US, honey bees are an introduced, domesticated species that we manage intensively, harvest bodily-produced products from, and keep in little beehive-barns. Like cows, only smaller and more stingy.
Depending on a single species for agricultural pollination puts us in a bit of a fix, though, when things go wrong. Native North American plants like blueberries were pollinated for millennia by native species before Europeans showed up with their newfangled bees. How has plopping honey bees into the mix affected agricultural ecosystems? Which is more efficient at pollination, native bees or introduced honey bees?
A new research paper written by Dr. Hanna Burrack measured just how much value-added native bees contribute to crops. For blueberries, they found it's not how many bees you have that are important, but how many kinds of bees that matters. Honey bees are nice, but a farm that also has bumble bees, carpenter bees, and many small specialist bee species working their blueberry bushes gets more fruit. Farmers gain an estimated $311 per acre of fruit for each additional bee group foraging in their fields.
With the advice of Clay Dingham of Bristol, Kemah Farm is planting native pollinator gardens in four plots near the blueberry plantation. Bare root stock and seeds from Prairie Moon Nursery are being planted this fall in plots rota-tilled by our neighbor Rodney Braley of Alexandria.
Our hope is that the “fruit of our labor” will not only be more scrumptous blueberries but more native pollinators.
This year on advice of Clay Dinham we did not mow the field until after the first hard frost. We did that to insure that the Monarch Butterflies that feed on our abundant crop of milk weed had time to mature and migrate down south.
At Kemah Farm we are conservationists. We want to have our actions enhance our water, lands and species that make this place home.
Our hope is that as you pick our blueberries you will also experience this place and the unique flora and fauna that live here.
