hi Dave, Let me see if I can answer some of your questions. 1.Weather conditions: It has to be warm enough for them to break the warm cluster in the hive. So above 40. Usually once the days start to get longer and as long as there is something to forage on. Usually they start cranking up with the maple blooms and dandelions. Those are usually the earliest things for them to work. Rain hampers them. Imagine getting pelted by those big workout balls. . . The clearer the day and the calmer, meaning less wind, the more will be out working. The most are out of the hive between 11AM and 2 PM. 2. Probably both color and scent. They have very good eyes adn they often work by scents. I don't know if a study has been done on that. 3. Yes they are series workers. They will work one thing until it is exhausted. That one thing is usually whatever they find first. If something comes into bloom that is closer to the hive, it will be ignored if they are already working something else. You also may want to note that bees will fly 2-5 miles to forage. If they find something further away than your orchard they will work it until it's done. Meanwhile your stuff could come into bloom and they may never touch it. You might want to try the beesource forum. www.beesource.com There are a number of professionals that provide pollination. You might also find a hobbyist looking for an outyard. 100 trees isn't alot so it would be a small pollination contract. You might be able to work out so you get it for free if someone is in need of an extra outyard. Best of luck

I know exactly what that looks like, and it's awesome! I used to love seeing them swarm the palm blossoms. My neighbors said I should cut the flower stalks off so they didn't attract bees...are they crazy!?

I hope you don't mind if I clear up a few points in this discussion. ;) First, Of course the fruit won't set if there is nothing to pollinate it. Tomatoes are self-fertile, the blooms contain both parts needed so they pollinate themselves. Bees and other insects are not required nor relevant. Humans cannot pollinate tomato plants effectively when the air temps fall into the Blossom Drop range. Dead pollen. Second, Blossom Drop - what you all are encountering (there is a FAQ on it here by the way and I linked it below) is a well-documented, well-researched, and normal part of growing tomatoes. It is primarily caused by air temps. If the air temps consistently exceed 90 in the day or fall below 55 or above 75 at night (+/- 5 degrees either way), the pollen in the bloom becomes tacky, clumps, and non-viable. You can hop on one foot and whistle Dixie while the moon turns to green cheese but it will make no difference. ;) Third, as the FAQ here points out, hormone sprays such as Blossom Set and other names MAY be of some help when it is cool temps that are the cause but the resulting fruit are often quite deformed. But hormone sprays will not work when heat is the problem. Sorry but that is well documented too. Fourth, blossom drop is not a problem of heirlooms. It is a natural response of all tomato varieties. However, some hybrid varieties have need created that are more tolerant of the heat and will set fruit under somewhat difficult conditions. Heatwave, Sunfire, Sun Tropic, Sun Master, (note the catchy names) are such varieties and if you do a search here you'll find several discussions on heat-tolerant tomatoes you may want to consider next year. Fifth, many varieties of both heirlooms and hybrids are mid-season or late season varieties. They naturally grow quite a bit first and only begin to bloom and set fruit later in the season. You shouldn't expect all varieties to set fruit at the same time regardless of the weather. Know your varieties and it genetic traits rather than imposing unrealistic expectations on them. ;) Mr. Stripey is an excellent example. It has always been notorious for poor fruit set or often NO fruit set. And it is an indeterminate so it can't rightfully be expected to set fruit at the same time a determinate Roma will. So the best you can do is be patient and while you wait for the weather to cooperate learn what to expect from the varieties you are growing, stabilize and control the moisture levels in your soil as much as possible, mulch the plants heavily to keep the roots cooler and the soil moisture from evaporating, avoid over-feeding and especially avoid over-feeding high nitrogen ferts as they only make the problem worse. Use protection for the plants on cool nights and provide sunscreen shade for them in the hottest part of the day. Plan to plant earlier if possible to get some fruit set prior to the usual onset of your high heat and keep the plants healthy until the heat passes and they can again set fruit. Or plant later to avoid the late spring coolies. I hope this is of help. If you wish to read more about Blossom Drop a search of this forum using that term will pull up hundreds of discussions about it for you. Good luck with your tomatoes everyone! ;) Dave Here is a link that might be useful: Blossom Drop FAQ

Since I plant so early in the year, my garden is almost done producing, which is fine with me because it is too hot to spend much time out there now. We got great yields from asparagus, potatoes, all the cool-season herbs, bush and pole green beans (planted in late March or earliest April), cabbage and sugar snap peas. The early corn produced high yields, and the mid-season corn (flooded at bottom of garden)produced moderate yields. Onions produced moderate yields but the garlic produced about the same as it does every year. The garlic is in its own raised bed away from the garden and the soil in it drains very well, so it didn't suffer from water-logged soils like the onions did. The lettuce did great until the weather got hot, and the summer squash produced plenty. It was a great tomato year, although I rarely have what I'd consider to be a bad tomato year. Every variety I planted produced something, except for the Brandywine varieties that were at the lower end of the garden which stayed waterlogged, with water several inches deep standing in it, for a couple of months. Even though they were in a raised bed, the Brandywines still stayed too wet----likely because their raised bed looked like an island standing in the middle of the ocean, so probably it stayed too wet despite being raised. We harvested our first, earliest tomatoes at the very tail end of April, and our largest harvest was from late May to late June, during which time I canned 200+ pints of tomato products and froze about 20 quarts. I finished up canning around mid-July, not because I ran out of jars, but because I just got tired of doing it. We are still harvesting tomatoes several days a week, but with the heat and dry conditions, they are no longer producing heavily. That's fine with me because I don't really want more than we can eat fresh at this point. Still, some days there's more than we can eat fresh, so I wash the extras and toss them into ziplock bags in the deep freeze. I have enough frozen to make several more batches of salsa. The fruit harvest was great. We ate all the strawberries and blackberries fresh, and ate all we wanted of the peaches and plums. I canned maybe 100 jars of jelly and jam (I didn't really keep track), with most of it being Peach Jam, Peach Jelly, Plum Jam and Plum Jelly, plus a smaller amount of Blueberry-Lime Jam. The only fresh fruit we are harvesting now is figs. The peppers got off to a really slow start because of the weather but are producing like gangbusters now. I imagine they will continue to produce heavily until cold weather arrives. The cool-season herbs have mostly burned up in the heat, but the warm-season herbs are doing great. There's a lot of things I never planted because of the flooding rains, and some of the things I finally got planted then drowned in the third round of flooding---the rain that fell the night Carter County flooded and the toddler was swept away out of his father's arms, which I think was out in Lone Grove. After that third round of flooding, the only thing I planted was watermelons, muskmelons and fall tomato plants. They're all doing fine, and the first icebox melons are now approaching harvest. It has been almost 4 weeks since we received any meaningful rainfall, so I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude about planting anything else for fall. We have had 1/100th of an inch at least twice in those 4 weeks, but getting your rain at a hundredth of an inch at a time is not very encouraging. I never got sweet potatoes, pickling cukes, okra, or PEPH peas planted because of the weather, and partly because the back garden wasn't planted this year due to weather and the subsequent weed invasion in the constantly wet soil. I planted slicing cukes early and they didn't do well, drowning after the third round of flooding. Overall, considering that we had 25.5" of rain in the prime gardening month of May and another 14 or 15" in June, I am pleased with how the garden performed. I would have understood completely if the entire garden had drowned during that time frame and if every plant had died. While the flavor of the earlier tomatoes was watered down by the rainfall, I mostly made them into salsa where their bland flavor was offset/overcome by the stronger flavors of the other ingredients: onions, bell peppers, hot peppers, garlic, cilantro and spices. We didn't really start getting tomatoes with great flavor until July, but we're still getting them and eating them now, so I'm not complaining. The tomatoes produced really well and continue to produce well, though obviously not as heavily. I have been thrilled with how well the oxhearts did this year. Normally oxhearts don't produce well for me at all because we tend to get too hot too early and they clearly don't care for that sort of early heat. This year the oxhearts produced heavily, their fruit was big and meaty and flavorful, and we still have a few (very few) oxhearts left on plants that now are half-dead from disease. The Dwarf Project's tomato varieties did great, and their PL foliage resisted disease much longer than that of the rest of my tomato plants. They also produced early and produced really well. The tomato plant that best withstood the plague of foliar diseases has been Marion, a Rutgers type that earned its way onto my list for next year by producing heavily and withstanding disease. Because I carefully spaced out my tomato plantings over a two-month time frame from late March through late May, the harvest has been spread out more widely than usual, which helped keep the canning from getting too overwhelming since I was getting tons of tree fruit at the same time the main tomato harvest was coming in. The plants that went into the ground in May began producing ripe fruit about the time the ones planted in March were slowly down, so it couldn't have worked out any better. I put the last round of spring tomatoes at the west end of the garden where they have morning sun and then dappled shade from the pecan tree, so those plants are still pretty comfortable and have been producing nice yields despite the lack of rainfall and the extreme heat. That's where I put some of my favorite tomatoes---Black Cherry, Ildi, SunGold, Gary O Sena, Indian Stripe, Jaune Flammee, Mortgage Lifter and Lillian's Yellow---so we're still getting fruit from them, and it is tasty. Amy, Indian Stripe's striping can vary from year to year. Often it is most apparent when they are maturing from the darker green stage to the lighter green stage, and often the stripes almost disappear by the time the tomatoes ripen. My fall tomato plants, foolish things that they are, are blooming now, but I am not expecting anything but blossom drop in this heat. With lows in the 80s and highs in the 100s, fruit set just isn't going to happen. We'll just have to wait for cooler temperatures to return. As various vegetable plants finished up and I yanked them out, I planted flowers and herbs, either from seed or from volunteers popping up in the garden, in their place, so still have a garden full of flowers, which means the garden also is full of butterflies, hummingbirds, bees and other pollinators. Since it mostly is too hot to weed, the garden is terribly weedy but I'll catch up on the weeding one of these days when the weather cools down. I've been happy overall with how the garden has done this year. In May, I really thought we'd lose it all to the flooding, and the fact that we didn't speaks volumes about how important raised beds are during rainy years especially in areas with poorly drained soil. Dawn