Sean Houtman wrote:


If you have enough aphids to feed the larvae, you can get enough hoverflies
to pollinate your flowers. I wouldn't try to count on them though.

Sean


I have loads of Asian ladybug beetles so that indicates I have loads
of aphids.
As to how good hoverflies do the job of pollinating compared to
honeybees
is questionable.

I noticed no insects on my Juneberries which is a troubling sign. And
of
all my plums in bloom only one tree had sweat bees on them yesterday.
Why one? Perhaps its smell. I am worried that these fruit trees will
not
be pollinated since I have not seen one single honeybee or bumblebee.
Maybe it is still a bit to chilly for them and will come out in time
for
apples and cherries?

But I have to question the honeybee since it was never native to North
America
and that North America had pollinators of fruit trees before the
honeybee was
introduced into North America. So what was the pollinater before the
honeybee?
Was it the hoverflies and sweatbees?

And if worse comes to worse where the honeybee and bumblebee no longer
exist
in North America, what will take their place as pollinators? Can the
hoverflies and
sweatbees take their place?

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies