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 - Cucumber sprouts

Every single one of the capsicum sprouts got munched by slugs.

Now I have cucumber sprouts that have worked realy well in the bean sprout sprouter.

These seem to have done particularly well in the sprouter, but that could just be because they are a large seed, and make a large sprout.








I'm calling using a bean sprout sprouter to raise seedlings for aquaponics, a total success.

This cucumber sprout is around 240mm in total length from tip of root to leaves.

That's a big sprout.

All grown from seed in the bean sprout sprouter, and all strong, healthy, and best of all totally organic.

Actually the real "best of all", is that it doesnt contain any dirt that needs washing off before planting in the system.

Also, it's length means the roots should reach nearly to the bottom of my grow beds.

Much more than they need to find all the water and nutrient they could desire.



And all that means they should have no problems growing.





120 Things in 20 years - struggling without a spell checker to post anything at all, but still managing to put some semi-science out there in the form of my Aquaponics cucumber sprouts.

Aquaponics - Cucumbric die back

Even though cucumbers are a summer thing, I feel an exception should be made for me.

I'm not sure why.

It turns out you can safely turn your back on your aquaponics system for a while, but your summer veggies die in the middle of winter if you don't look at them every day.










I'll try again in a few months.



120 Things in 20 years The home of aquaponic cucumbric die back

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 - Spring has sprung

I love spring.

I sneeze a lot, but I still love it.

I'm in the southern hemisphere, so its spring.

I wont use the word spring in the post again.

Because I've been busy studying electronics, I find it a real relief to walk out into the grow house every so often, and smell the roses so to speak. I don't actually have roses, but I have these.

Peas

Beans

Cucumber

Tomato




spring

Strawberry (18 on that little plant so far)













and more.


Watching plants grow, and fish swim, is the cure for study.


not just Aquaponics - Spring has sprung - 120 Things in 20 years