I don't know if it will work for you or not, but there were no usable male flowers open when my last female flower opened. I took one of the closed male flowers that were starting to "ripen" and getting ready to open and peeled the flower petals off of it. I rubbed it with my finger to be safe and some pollen came off even though it was not yet open. The best thing I can say to do if you're worried about it, is to just test it. Worse comes to worse you cut a male flower for nothing. Oh well, there will be more later. Or, if you don't want to do that, you can wait. Everyone else is right, there will be plenty of male and female flowers later. My watermelon plant did that. My female flowers opened first and started dying off. I know, it's odd and I couldn't figure out why. Anyways, the male flowers came a bit after that and I had lots of personal sized watermelon. Good luck to you and keep up hope!

I will let you know what happens next. I went on the Sialis website to get info about this and, apparently, it sometimes happens. Sometimes it's an older female with younger males (per the website). It was interesting at first because I didn't know why the second male was always hanging around. I thought one of the males was just after the mealworms. The 3 of them always sat in a tree by my window. I couldn't quite get a handle on the second male. But I knew that it was MOST unusual. One day when I had lots of time to watch, I observed both males and the female taking turns at my mealworm feeder. They usually entered the feeder one at a time. And I was amazed to see them all going back and forth to the nest box with the worms and doing the same thing after the babies fledged.

Hello, Pictures would really help to narrow this down. You are saying it looks like they are being bitten off and then you mention discoloration and the presence of ants. You may have many things going on here. Discoloration inside blossoms can be due to insects like thrips. Thrips are so small that you could easily miss them. To me they appear to be moving splinters. But, the only pests aside from birds and small mammals that can eat something as big as a melon blossom would seem to be slugs/snails/worms/beetles. I encourage you to put out yellow sticky cards to catch the perpetrator or try to catch them in a spot-light at night. Without a proper ID, it is hard to tell someone what to do about the problem. Because, even if you try to use a remay.....at this point you could just be trapping the pest in with the crop. I also encourage you to research cucumber beetles. Here, They are very destructive pests and are often found inside squash blossoms/cucurbitaceae.

I don't have any experience with estrogen but vaginal ointments would be for dryness, I would think. If it was prescribed for osteoporosis you would think it was be in a low dose oral medication. I always discuss the why and how does it relate to me with doctors. I don't understand how so many just do whatever they are told without questions and understanding exactly why. I'd be concerned that maybe something else happened to you and the estrogen isn't involved. Correlation doesn't mean causation. Did you doctor think the estrogen was involved? It sounds like your primary just brushed off your concerns and kicked the problem down to the gyno. I would be looking for a new doctor. I haven't a had a gyno in years. I'm 73. Just my primary who sends us to a specialist if necessary.