Bees - Cucumberic life without bees

The worlds bee population is in the process of being wiped out.

It's called "Colony Collapse Disorder",  which is the kind of name doctors tend to give things when they have no idea what the problem is, but want to be able to refer to it in an unambiguous manner that makes other people feel they know what the're talking about.

 Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD is wiping out VERY large numbers of honey bee hives. People that keep bees professionally have closed up shop after losing all their bees.

A while ago, a clerk at the patent office named Albert said, "If all the bees were to disappear,  humans would have 4 years before we were wiped out.", but as far as I know he wasn't a bee expert, but was a very clever man.

The reality is that bees make food grow. almost all our food crops rely on the honey bee to make their fruit, nuts and seeds. Without them we will either learn to eat grass and ferns, or die.

In the last half of this summer, we have not seen a single bee.

I've been looking for them, and I'm pretty good at looking.

I hand pollinated half my cucumber flowers with a small artists paint brush, and left the other half to nature, and not one of natures flowers bore fruit.

Not one.

I'm trying to arrange some native blue banded bees to try to fix the problem.

Some time ago I set up a time lapse photography shot of some cucumbers that I thought I had hand pollinated, but half way through the shoot, I realised I had the memory stick that was for the camera on my desk.

Oh well. At least it wasn't as big a fail as the idiot that coded the little beep noise that tells you it's working. Their design work means the device continues to make the I've just taken a picture "beep" even when there's no card in the device.

Clever.

Anyway...

Here's some time lapse of the second setup where I used the plants that were not being hand pollinated. Pay particular attention to the 3 already formed little cucumbers just to the right of centre. (sorry about all the black dead space at the end, youtube's edit says it doesn't exist so you must be imagining it just like me) ...




youtube is giving me some grief. The clip works around 50% of the time in the different ways I test stuff.

This might work http://youtu.be/z85OlJScCEE

If it's not fixed soon I'll redo it.

Aquaponics - Artificial pollination

I've been artificially pollinating my cucumber plants for a while now.

I do the hand pollination thing with a small artist paintbrush, because my original - whatever you call cotton on a stick in your part of the world (cotton buds, cotton swabs, etc)- fell to bits, and was really only a stick by the end.

But I've been wondering if picking a handful of male flowers, and dropping into a blender of water, might just give me a pollen shake to spray into the female flowers. Obviously it would depend on the survivability of pollen in a blender. It's just an idea, and although a quick search didn't find it, it may well have been tried.

It might be a really quick and easy method to pollinate things that don't do the thing with the bees for whatever reason.

I suspect the reason my cucumbers are not getting pollinated, is because there don't seem to be any bees. I seem to remember something about bees mysteriously dying out or something.

I have no idea if it will work, but given none of my cucumbers set fruit without my intervention, it should be easy enough to test. I think all I'll need to do is separate two of my four cucumber plants, and spray one with the pollen shake, and leave the other untouched. The two remaining plants I'll keep pollinating by hand because I need the cucumbers.

This experiment will have to wait for a while, because I've hand pollinated all the flowers this week. I'll separate the two test plants, and wait until they stop producing fruit before I start the test. I'll use the delay to see if anyone else is doing it, or if it wont work for some reason.



120 Things in 20 years - It's 6am and I haven't slept yet.

Aquaponics - Cucumber

Cucumber.

Strange word.

Anyway, I've been getting good results with hand pollination. For some reason the female flowers (the ones with the fruit attached to the back of them, open well, but the males don't.

I thought bees were supposed to do this work. There are no bees anywhere doing anything. Is there a strike or something. Perhaps people are talking about it on TV. Maybe there is a reason to watch TV after all.

I planted my four cucumber plants in the corner of the growbed nearest the door. The door stays open for summer, so I trained the plants to grow outside.

Actually it doesn't really matter if the door was open or closed, they could be made to grow under the door with a little pruning.






I've been using a small, soft artist's paint brush to tickle all the flowers on my plants and do the bees work for them.

Every female flower I've hand pollinated has produced a very tasty fruit, but none of those that I left for the bees have manage to set fruit.

There seems to be a lot of fruit. More than we could use, but they are finding good homes with friends and relatives.

One even went to a friendly relative.





120 Things in 20 years - Cucumber is still a funny word.

Aquaponics - Cucumbers!

Cucumbers!

I've been trying to grow cucumbers! for the entire time I've been involved with aquaponics, but have had a miserable time of it. I kept getting tiny cucumbers! that had failed to pollinate properly, and would shrivel up and die after they reached two centimetres in length.

But I just noticed this.

It's a cucumber!

Actually it's a stack of cucumbers!

I've been hand pollinating them with a cotton  bud. Q-tip? Whatever they call cotton on a stick in your part of the world.

It has worked.





That green thing on the one in focus is caterpillar poop.




120 Things in 20 years - Cucumbers!

Aquaponics - Capsicum pollination fail

I don't know enough about plant reproduction.

I don't like not knowing enough about plant reproduction, so I'm going to do something about it.

Since I put up the grow house, I've had some concerns about pollination. With the door closed and when the weather is cold there isn't a lot of insect life around my plants. Most things seem to take care of themselves, but I have a cotton bud that I use on the first flowers I see.

The first flowers I see of something like my strawberries are more important then the next, because I want to taste the fruit, and I want to get photo's for this blog. As a result I try to take care of them a bit, and make sure they don't get eaten, or knocked off by my clumsy moves around the grow bed. (it's amazing how much damage one person can do when chasing a tiny bug around with a camera).

I also take the extra effort to make sure they are pollinated. To do this I have a cotton bud in a little jar that I keep in the grow house that I stick into flowers. I don't bother with it as an ongoing thing, but I almost always do it to the first of a new fruit or vegetable.

When my first capsicum flower opened, I didn't have another to cross pollinate with, but I thought I'd collect some pollen on the cotton bud I keep around, so that I'd have some for the next flower at least. So I took a swab. The cotton was already yellow with pollen from the first tomatoes, the first strawberries, and whatever else I'd used it on. 

That first flower turned into a fruit, so I didnt bother doing it to the next few.

The odd thing is, that the next few failed to be pollinated, and the fruit did what un-pollinated fruit do. They shriveled, died, and dropped to the ground.










On hot days when the grow house door is left open, I get a lot of visitors from the bug world, including some bees. I suspect that a bee or someone with a similar taste for pollen, visited my first flowers on my strawberries, and before I took a swab, left behind some capsicum pollen from a nearby garden. I took it up on the swab and passed it on to my capsicum's first flower.

Maybe.

I might be wrong, but just in case, I wandered out into the garden and, using the same cotton bud, collected pollen from a random selection of flowers.

It hadn't occurred to me that the bees would not just leave the correct pollen for the plant to set fruit, but it would leave a stack of different pollen. And perhaps not just the pollen it had collected, but probably pollen from everything the entire hive had visited. And given that flowers between hives are vised from both hives, perhaps even pollen from other hives. Pollen is small. really small. Small enough to be in the air and make allergic people sad. I'm told that today the pollen count is high, but I cant see any of it.

Small.

For the next few days I'll be taking my cotton bud around with me and stick it into flowers to collect a decent sample of everything that's currently flowering. Then I'll do it a few more times at different times of the year. Eventually I'll have every kind of pollen I'll ever need. It seems the stuff stays viable for a while as well.

It's also possible that capsicum flowers don't need pollination, thus my need for further education.




120 Things in 20 years, sometimes plant romance needs a helping hand, because sometimes aquaponics capsicum pollination fails.

Aquaponics - Pollination

Plant sex is pretty interesting, but I don't know a lot about it. Hopefully this is my first step toward gaining a better understanding.

I found a stack of strawberries that don't seem to have progressed past the "Here I am!" stage. I kept an eye on them, and eventually their stems rotted and the fruit lay on the ground.

I have a feeling it might be to do with pollination. Now that everything is in a grow house, I wonder if there is enough insect activity to pollinate properly. I remember having pumpkins in a dirt garden years ago,who's flowers didn't open enough to allow bees in, and they went the same way. There would be a beginning of a fruit, but it would never develop.

The dead strawberries had flowers that opened and formed normally, and there are a stack of insects walking and flying around, but no bees or other large insects.

Most of the other strawberries are doing just fine, so they either don't need pollinating, or are getting pollinated by the smaller insects, or being pollinated in some other way that I'm unaware of.

This will be my first year growing things like tomatoes and cucumbers, so I really want to get this stuff sorted, and get a decent understanding of the issues.

So far most of the plants I've grown don't involve flowering and setting fruit. They have mostly been green leafy salad veggies that don't need bees until they go to seed. By the time they go to seed, I'm more likely to pull them up and feed them to the fish, rather than worry about their reproductive habits.

I'll learn some stuff about pollination.

.

Aquaponics - Strawberry cross breeding

Cross breeding things is one of those things I know nothing about.

There are a great many others, but cross breeding is the one I make vague reference to in this post.

I have some strawberry plants that set pink flowers.

This surprised me a little because I didn't know they existed. But that's no big deal, as that's my standard level of understand I have of almost every species in the universe.

This picture doesn't really do them justice, but the better photo I took of this plant makes my eyes hurt.

The point I'm making here is that they are pink.

I also have a variety that has white flowers.

Really white flowers.

So white you cant photograph them on the auto setting of my camera, because my camera keeps looking deeper to see what it is I want it to capture.

White.

But exactly half way between those two plants in the grow bed, I find I now have pink flowers.

Light pink flowers.

This plant is one of the runners from one of my original plants with white flowers.

Now it's just as likely that this is just a lack of iron or something, as it is that some kind of cross breeding is going on, but that's not the point.

For one thing, I think to cross breed something you need it to flower, and then cross pollinate with a different variety. This means the flower wouldn't be pink yet. But it is a descendant of my first strawberry plant. This could mean it cross pollinated last season.

Or something.

So, and this bit is the point, I have no idea about this cross pollination business. And that means I need to find out.

So I'll find out.

If it's interesting, I'll let you know.