We live near several large cherry orchards, which are in beautiful full bloom right now. Last year and this year, we’ve noticed something unusual that the farmers are doing.
Here and there in the orchards are small sapling cherry trees, probably planted as replacements when old ones were diseased. Next to each blooming sapling tree are placed a couple of big buckets, and each bucket is filled with several cut cherry branches, all in full bloom. The branches are leaned/intertwined with the blooming branches of the sapling.
I guess that it’s something to do with pollination, but what? Why would they do it with just the saplings? What’s going on here?
So I would guess that the grower is finding out right away which seedlings are going to produce decent fruit, and which ones are duds, and he’s using buckets of “the other” kind of cherry to do it.
And putting the buckets of cherry blossoms down where the seedlings’ flowers are, right where the bees can’t possibly miss it, is probably just a way to ensure good fruit set. All the other blossoms are up high. Bees tend to specialize in whatever flower is in bloom at the moment, and to go from one flower to the next, and you can’t expect a bee cruising along for “cherries at 35 feet” to be looking down at the ground, like, “Oh, I wonder if there are some cherry blossoms down there in the grass…” So you put a big bunch of cherry blossoms all together where Ms. Bee can’t miss it down there.
I had indeed Googled my question before posting, but couldn’t come up with anything useful. Using some of the terms found in your research, I was able to re-Google my question and found this fact: mature cherry trees usually include a couple of the “cross-pollinator” branches grafted right onto them. I suppose that the young saplings (which BTW were big enough to contain plenty of flowers and potentially bear a good bit of fruit) may have been too young to bear much grafting yet and so the cut branch method was relied upon. This is all extrapolation, though. Good enough for me! Now I’ll go and dazzle Mr. Pug with my impressive abilities at deduction.