I've never seen any on my tomato flowers either, just "around". They get fertilized somehow. If you're concerned you can take a Q-tip and swab all the flowers, I suppose.

Thanks for the advice, I'll try it!

Jitai - Tomatoes don't need bees to pollinate. Most of the time, they self-pollinate. But if you want to help it along, you can do something even easier than the Q-tip - just shake the plant and/or "flick" the flowers (not too hard so that you don't knock them off). Works just great. ;-)

What about tomato set spray? I've heard from a reliable tomato grower that it works like a charm. Anyone else use this?

I have noticed this in my garden, though I have had vegetables I am not noticing many bees and butterflies, many ants yes, but they are thristy.

I am really worried that our devastation of the world, and global warming is wiping out our insects and we are doomed, this is the first year that I have felt this. We have to do somthing now, and question this.

I have seen bumble bees, they are the ones that are pollinating, but they are very few, they are my true workers, helping me and I adore them. But not other bugs are there, I am very sick with worry about our plants and wildlife.

If any of you have seen this let me know.

sincerely,

Deb

hughesillustration@comcast.com

Here is a link that might be useful: hughesillustration

I am up in a hi-rise on the 18th floor and when it is warm, I have plenty of bees and wasps and yes even butterflies - to the point where they often bother my hummingbirds and the chases ensue. I recently watched a hummer take off after an Eastern swallowtail and never knew a butterfly could move so fast despite the fact that it was larger than the hummer! There are many interesting tiny insects - mostly small wasps - who help with pollination as much as the bee. In fact even my hummingbird visitors have helped to pollinate my tomatoes, even though I try to flick the blossoms! LOL

This earth has gone through numerous climatic cycles through its 4 billion years of existence - 99% of which we, Homo sapiens var. sapiens, having only been around for ~30,000 years of that time, have yet to ever experience or even fathom. Some cycles can run 500 years, 1000 years, or even 10,000 years or more. So I think we sometimes put too much weight on the immediate small cycles that we experience and not enough on the longer term ones, which are slowly being discovered. It wasn't until the 1870s when the U.S. began keeping standardized "official" temperature and precipitation records and the thermometer itself as we know it, wasn't even invented until the period between the 1500s - 1700s.

I recall back in the '70s when there was little or no talk about "global warming" because by golly, we were on the verge of the next "ice age", and that was the main media focus in almost as strident a tone as today's focus on "global warming". I most notably recall the winter of 1977, which I dubbed "glacial", where we had snowpack here that would melt and then refreeze so many times that everything was covered in almost clear glacial ice.

This doesn't mean that there aren't things that we can do to try to bring some balance back to the environment. But again, I think we need to be more mindful about the fact that there are and always will be certain regular climate cycles that we have no control over and we and the rest of the life on this planet will have to adapt to these. There are countless species no longer in existence today, only known about due to uncovering their fossil remains. We certainly had no hand in destroying those species because neither we nor any other mammals, were around at the time. Major global climate change in fact was what allowed the mammal to even come into existence. It's all the ebb and flow of the planet.