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I grow tomatoes on my fire escape in downtown San Francisco. I had to self-pollinate them with an electric toothbrush. I'm pretty sure this is due to the natu
by bigmac 16y ago
I grow tomatoes on my fire escape in downtown San Francisco. I had to self-pollinate them with an electric toothbrush. I'm pretty sure this is due to the natural lack of bees in San Francisco, not because of the bee die-off due to this chemical.
So my question to the more agriculture knowledgeable HN'ers: how hard would it be to do self-pollination at scale? I imagine the answer is "impossible." Is that too pessimistic?
- barnaby 16y agoIt's "possible" ... I saw a program about CCD on PBS. There are parts of China where they've killed off all the bees in traditional farming areas. The video showed entire fields of workers holding jars of pollen and taking feather dusters, swathing them in the pollen, then waving them around the flowers. Very labor intensive.
- cryptoz 16y agoThat sounds like an excellent use-case for armies of flying nano-bots. Well, what are we waiting for?
- gloob 16y agoWell, first we're waiting for someone to invent flying nanobots. Then we're waiting for someone to successfully convince the public that flying nanobots somehow won't kill us all.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- tb 16y agoWhat is a bee if not a miniature flying pollination machine? :)
- hyperbovine 16y agoSeriously? It's was our faith in mankind's ability to engineer its way out of any mess that gave us this miracle pesticide in the first place. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
- cryptoz 16y ago> Seriously? Hehe no, no, I was joking. I clearly don't think that armies of flying nanobots are actually a potential solution to this problem.
- djcapelis 16y agoWe could call them... bees.
- zephjc 16y agonew-bees? :-P
- dkersten 16y agoAnd a great excuse for China to develop armies of flying nano-bots without it being too suspicious.
- drinian 16y agoEr, isn't that an excellent use-case for hiring more beekeepers?
- jmm 16y agoActually, I hope that people's budding interest in hobby beekeeping can help pick up the slack... I was thinking the other day about the viability of a small business that would install apiaries in peoples back yards, and the hosts would get a share of the honey. The rest would be sold at at markets. A distributed system of bzzzzz. Eh? An article in the nytimes the other day inspired the idea - about how different communities are dropping prohibitions on urban beekeeping. Of course, this article appeared only a few days after another article about bees drinking maraschino cherry juice in Red Hook and producing red metallic-tasting honey.
- Andys 16y agoWe had to get rid of our hive from our back yard due to neighbour complaints. Many people think a bee sting is going to kill them.
- jonah 16y agoAnd for some people [1] it just might. [1] http://www.hmc.psu.edu/healthinfo/b/beesting.htm http://www.hmc.psu.edu/healthinfo/b/beesting.htm
- Andys 16y agoYeah, but living within 20 metres of a hive doesn't mean anything about risk of getting stung. Bees are quite happy to fly miles to get their nectar. Most of the bees from our hive visibly flew straight up and away from our area. Since getting rid of the hive, our garden is still full of bees.
- jonah 16y agoI didn't meant to imply their fear was justified. ;)
- yters 16y agoI think we will be eating many more bananas in the near future.
- tcskeptic 16y agoOf course bananas are under attack by their own potentially devastating blight, so that may need reconsideration.
- billswift 16y agoSomewhat off-topic trivia: Vanilla is the only orchid grown for food, it is native to Central America, but most grown commercially comes from Madagascar. It is dependent, in the wild, on pollination from a particular moth. Since that moth doesn't live in the areas where most vanilla is grown, virtually all commercial vanilla is hand pollinated.
- nkurz 16y agoTomatoes are not normally pollinated by honeybees. They have self-fertile flowers, so generally they pollinate themselves when shaken by the wind. Native bumblebees are sometimes used in greenhouses, and other insects (smaller than honeybees) sometimes play a role. I don't know about San Francisco, but there are quite a few urban hives in the East Bay. While there are CCD problems in the area with some beekeepers, there still are many bees in the area. I buy commercial honey from Bee Healthy, who keep hives around Oakland.
- route66 16y agoAbout the bees you could check with http://www.sfbee.org/beekeeping.html http://www.sfbee.org/beekeeping.html if it's a city-related problem or just a neighborhood/plant related issue. In some busy city-areas in Europe it turns out that bees have more varied resources there than on the often mono cultural countryside. Thanks for the tip: I will threaten my bees with a toothbrush when they are lazy next year.
- hugh3 16y agoOfftopic, but: is it legal to grow tomatoes on your fire escape? If there's a fire, will the people upstairs run headlong into a tomato vine?