If you asked 100 people on the street what bees produce, 99 of them would probably say honey. What most people wouldn’t say, or wouldn’t know, is that bees also indirectly produce close to 33% of common fruits and vegetables. They do so through pollination.
In a place like California, this means that they are pollinating much of the fruit and vegetables that end up on our tables. And one of these items that people in California particularly love and want is avocado. Avocado trees actually depend a great deal on bee pollination to produce fruit.
One of the complications with avocado production is that it’s hard to keep a regular supply going since the trees only offer a healthy crop once every two years. Enter the bees. Avocado flowers require a vector in order to bring the pollination from the female stage to the male stage. The honey bee can serve as the pollinator and currently is the only commercially introduced pollinator used in avocado orchards today.
In order to have happy bees to do the pollination, you need a certain strength in bee numbers. This is one of the reasons that California is such a great place to work on bee pollination for avocado groves, since the weather is typically mild and conducive to building a solid bee population. The honey bees end up visiting both the female and male stage avocado flowers and help to increase avocado production, sweetness and size.
While avocado production in California has hit snags in the past, the introduction of honeybees has been making a huge difference for farmers in the area. Interestingly, while avocado farmers would traditionally install one or two honeybee hives in the past to help with production, in recent years farmers and researchers have found that doubling that amount is making a huge difference.
Next time you purchase an avocado in California, you’ll have a very different perspective about how it was grown and the time and energy taken to create the right size and sweetness of this delicious fruit.