For the life of me can't understand why anyone would want to encourage
bumble bees near your plantings. Clearly you have had little experience in
defending yourself from those beasts. I had to rush my son to the emergency
room when he was 5 after stumbling into a nest of bumble bees, and I've been
stung also. He was rewarded with 5 stings to the top of his head at once.
Bumble bees are fiercely territorial, at least the ones here in Texas are. I
encourage you to simply hand pollinate your tomatillos....or buy them at the
supermarket. I can do with more honey bees and fewer bumble bees.
Thomas
"Dominic-Luc Webb" wrote in message
...

Interesting that I was reading up on raising honey bees to
discover this Summer that tomatillos (the goal of my endeavors)
are almost completely ignored by honey bees. They may interrogate
for a short time, but they invariably end up ignoring these
flowers. Bumble bees, on the other hand, showed highly selective
exploratory behaviour for these flowers. They made very frequent
visits to these flowers that resulted in actual time spent in
the flower. These flowers yielded excellent fruit. Another
group of plants without access to bumble bees but extensive
access to honey bees yielded no fruit whatsoever.

I conclude that tomatillos flowers are not interesting to honey
bees. They will favor essentially any other flower in the area.
Thus, no point in bothering with trying to get some honey bee
hives going.

I then looked a bit on the net and it seems there is a hugely
disproportionate amount of info about raising bumble bees. I am
curious, do farmers who raise such plants make any special
provisions to raise bumble bees? Anyone know any good literature
on how best to get a colony going in close proximity to my
plants? Info regarding honey bees is not applicable for the
case of bumble bees.

Dominic