Attracting Bees and Pollinators to Your Orchard

Why Pollinators Decide Your Crop

Every apple, pear, plum and cherry on your trees began with a grain of pollen moving from one flower to another. Get that transfer right and you get a full crop; get it wrong and you get a scattering of small, misshapen fruit — or nothing at all. Apple blossom is only receptive for a few days, and the king blossom at the centre of each cluster opens first. If the weather turns cold and wet and the bees stay home, that window closes fast.

Most dessert apples are self-sterile, so they need pollen from a different variety that flowers at the same time. Bramley's Seedling, Ribston Pippin and Blenheim Orange are triploids and cannot pollinate anything at all — they need two other varieties nearby to set a decent crop themselves. Cider orchards are usually a mosaic of bittersweet, bittersharp and sharp varieties in different pollination groups, which is helpful, but only if the insects are there to work the flowers. That is where a bit of planning on your part pays off handsomely.

Meet Your Orchard Pollinators

We tend to picture honeybees, but a well-managed orchard hosts a far wider cast. Understanding who is doing the work helps you give them what they need.

• Solitary mining bees emerge in early spring, sometimes before the honeybees are flying, and are excellent apple pollinators because they are not fussy about species.
• Mason bees nest in hollow stems and wall cavities, and a single female can visit hundreds of blossoms a day.
• Bumblebees fly in cooler, damper conditions than honeybees and will work blossom when nothing else will. They are also strong enough to buzz-pollinate flowers with tight anthers.
• Hoverflies and other flies are often overlooked, but in some orchards they make up a significant share of blossom visitors.
• Honeybees bring sheer numbers, especially if you have a hive or two within a mile.

Collectively, wild pollinators often do most of the heavy lifting — provided the orchard gives them food, shelter and a break from chemicals.

Plant Companion Flowers for a Long Season

Bees need food before, during and after your trees are in bloom. Aim for something in flower in every month from February to October, planted in the alleys, along hedge banks and in odd corners.

• Late winter: willow catkins, crocus, hellebore and lungwort give early bees their first meal.
• Spring: let dandelions and white clover flower before you mow, and add comfrey, wallflowers and self-seeding forget-me-nots.
• Early summer: phacelia, borage, crimson clover and birdsfoot trefoil are magnets and grow well in grass alleys.
• Late summer and autumn: knapweed, yarrow, marjoram, red clover and field scabious carry pollinators through to the end of the season.

Choose single, open flowers rather than double-flowered cultivars — those frilly blooms often have no accessible nectar or pollen. Plant in generous drifts rather than single specimens, because pollinators forage by sight and a striking patch of one colour is far easier for them to find than a scattering of odds and ends.

Give Them Somewhere to Live

Mason bees and leafcutters nest in hollow plant stems, beetle borings and old mortar. Around 70 per cent of our solitary bee species nest underground, in bare, sunny soil. Both are easy to provide.

• Leave a few south-facing patches of bare earth undisturbed — no mulch, no mowing.
• Stack old logs and prunings in a quiet corner; dead wood shelters beetles, which in turn feed birds.
• Bundle hollow canes or bamboo, or drill holes of 6–10mm into a block of untreated timber, and fix it at chest height facing the morning sun.
• Allow a rough tussocky strip or bramble bank to stand — bumblebees often nest in old vole burrows beneath it.
• Keep a shallow dish of water with pebbles in it so insects can drink without drowning.

Rotten fruit left under the trees is also useful: butterflies and hoverflies feed on the sugary juice well into autumn.

Spraying with Care

Most orchard sprays are far kinder to bees than gardeners assume, but timing matters more than anything. The cardinal rule is simple: never spray an insecticide while blossom is open, and not while flowering weeds are present in the alley. The danger period runs from first open flower to about 90 per cent petal fall.

Spray in the evening, once bees have stopped flying, and check the label for bee warnings. Avoid drift onto hedgerows, which are often in flower and always full of nesting insects. Where you can, use cultural controls first: grease bands against winter moths, pheromone traps, removing infected wood, and encouraging predators such as earwigs and lacewings. Sulphur and other permitted fungicides are best applied at dusk too, and never as a tank mix with anything the label flags for pollinators.

Managing the Orchard Through the Year

Good pollinator management is mostly about restraint. Mow paths and a tidy strip under the trees, but leave the rest to flower before you cut it, then mow in rotation so there is always somewhere for insects to shelter. Raise the cutter bar a little so you do not scalp the rosettes of clover and trefoil. In autumn, leave fallen leaves and a little untidiness in the corners — it is habitat, not neglect. Take a walk round the orchard at midday in May, count what is visiting your blossom, and adjust from there. Do that for two or three seasons and you will notice something quietly reassuring: more hum in the branches, and heavier crops on the trees.