Hi All,
honey bees will go for for the largest area of polination, because they are
after the volume of nectar. so if you have a couple of trees, next to a
field of oil seed rape, they may very well ignore your trees in favour of
the rape. it is easy for bees to work a large area, rather than go from tree
to tree and waste time. hope this makes sense and is of some help to you.

Richard M. Watkin.
,
"DPS" wrote in message
...
Just speculating here. Taking up one thread from Steve:

My recollection is that during that short period of their lives when
honey bees are gathering, a given bee will specialize in a given type of
blossom. (This might make sense from a data storage point of view, tiny
brain, figures out 1 type of blossom, etc.) So if this is the case, if
there were twice as many peach trees, (2 instead of 1) there would be
twice the chance that a newbee would first encounter a peach and then
specialize in it doubling the number of peach tree bees and doubling the
chance of both peach trees being fertilized. Although perhaps each with
its own pollen.

Maybee?
David.

Steve wrote:
.......

The only possible mechanism that I can think of that could make two
identical trees pollinate better than one is as follows. Suppose you had
an Elberta peach and it was the only fruit tree for a mile in any
direction. If you had another Elberta growing next to it, there would be
twice as many flowers and just maybe that would attract more bees. More
bees would pollinate more flowers and might improve fruit set. That's a
bit of a stretch and it would only matter if your area had a low bee
population.

Steve




Sherwin Dubren wrote:

I have often seen descriptions of certain fruit trees, specified as
self
fertile, that their productivity can be increased by having two or more
trees of the same variety nearby. I can't understand what is the
genetic difference between pollen from the same tree and pollen from an
identical species nearby. Is there some other mechanism at work here?

Sherwin Dubren