I keep mason bees.

It is so sad to me that I 'maybe' saw three honey bees this past summer. I have a lot of mason bees and bumbles, however. I offered a bee keeper my small orchard of 30 trees to place a hive, but he wanted to charge me $3,000.00 to do it and no honey for me. Outrageous, so I've done with less pollination. Yes, that dollar figure is correct. Mrs. G

ltilton mason bees are a great idea. Mrs. G that is outrageous and a little hard for me to understand. $30- $300 seems a little more like what t should be. Some of my neighbors spray when the fruit trees are in bloom so that may be what he is worried about but a hive only costs $200 with bees here. Why not just buy a hive for that price? I hate to admit it but I did not kill wasps this year because there was such a bee shortage. I plant more grapes than they could ever eat for their fall food and in the spring they were working flowers just like everything else. I never thought I would resort to keeping wasps for some of my pollination.

I found this article from Cornell on fig tree pollination interesting

Here is a link that might be useful: fig tree pollination