I was watching the honey bees all over my peach tree flowers today and it occurred to me that peaches are self fertile and wondered if the bees help peaches at all or would the trees create the same quantity and quality fruit with no bees at all?
I searched on google and can’t find anything
The peaches will produce the same with or without bees. There are rare exceptions but nothing to be concerned about.
Hopefully they’ll stick around for the cherries and apples
Put in little patches of yarrow, lavender, etc. between (not in) the fruit tree basins to keep the bees coming nearly year-round. Trailing rosemary blooms year-round here but it is best to put it in a pot so it doesn’t get out of hand.
Posted on the regional site I lost all my redskin peach buds and partials on others. European pear buds are all brown plums buds and blooms did not survive. Peach buds were at first pink although no blooms and three nights of 26 to 28 were too much for them. One night closer to 20. Cold was sustained pretty much over the entire three or so days.
Apple still has a ways to go thankfully.
Really nice today after a cold start. Did some pear grafting and saw the damage better when I was up close and the weather warmed.
Some folks call that self fruitful.
Self fruitful and pollination are two different processes.
Try reading this
“Peaches do not require cross-pollination but do require bee activity for the best fruit set.”
https://extension.umd.edu/resource/fruit-plant-pollination
Since one of the moderators said you dont need bees and its of no concern you can also go that route instead. You can pollinate the flowers yourself with a paintbrush or something of that nature.
“The pink blossoms of peach trees attract two groups of insects: those in search of pollen and those in search of nectar. This increases the odds of visits to the blossoms by insects that cause the pollen to drop from the anther to the stigma – the more, the merrier when it comes to pollinating peach tree blossoms!”
https://minnetonkaorchards.com/peach-tree-pollination/
So its up to you and google and a moderator to figure out the truth.
In general peaches set so much fruit with or without pollinators, that practically speaking, it doesn’t matter.
Technically, peaches will set better with pollinators, but again it’s superfluous. When you have to thin 75% or more of the fruit off, it doesn’t matter if you have pollinators or not.
I’ve read that experiments caging individual peach blooms (to prevent pollinator activity) did result in less fruit set, but still resulted in full crops.
Also remember there are many other pollinators than bees. People focus on honey bees because they are the most efficient pollinators (when the weather is favorable). Wind also carries pollen.
I have my peach tree in an underground greenhouse. (No bees). I simply bang the limbs around and there is pollen flying around, all over the place. If you get high winds, I think you will also have good pollination.
It sounds like peaches must make a lot of pollen? Wind alone may be doing sufficient work here.
Here in the rainy Pacific Northwest, my peach trees have always had a hard time setting fruit. It was better when there were more bees around. In the last few years, we’ve had very few bees in this urban setting; I’ve resorted to raising my own Mason Bees, but that hasn’t helped much. Part of the problem is that I have two large sweet cherries and a plum tree nearby, and the bees seem to prefer them over the small peach tree. I had a larger peach tree before it died a few years ago, and it didn’t have much of a crop either.
One thing that I’ve noticed is that my peach trees (3 varieties) have always had rather small and inconspicuous flowers. I presume that is one reason that they do not attract bees. So, in my situation, I think that pollination by bees is necessary for a good peach crop.
My current variety is Redhaven, which is supposed to be self fertile; most ads say that it is self pollinating, which I know can’t be right.
For peaches, there are quite a few factors which can affect fruit set. Sometimes peach trees don’t produce many flower buds. This can be driven by age, variety, amount of shade the tree produces to the lower canopy, timing of pruning, health of tree, and perhaps a few other factors.
I’ve been examining our peach trees for flower buds and noticed the flower bud development this summer was lighter than I’d prefer.
You can check your trees for flower buds by noticing the number of single buds at each node of a shoot. Single buds almost always mean a leaf bud. Multiple buds per node mean generally mean a flower bud. As the buds develop, leaf buds are somewhat smaller and slightly pointed compared to flower buds.
If the flower bud development on your peach trees is good, and you notice a plethora of flowers during bloom, then the problem is generally spring frosts, which can severely destroy blooms and young fruitlets.
If one is certain there are no spring frosts, it’s possible the flowers are being killed by blossom blight, caused by M. fructicola.
Similarly, blossom blast is another disease which can kill blooms, caused by the bacteria, P. syringae.
In rainy climates, peach leaf curl can also be a significant problem. A tree with significant peach leaf curl will quickly abort fertilized fruitlets. The peach tree will also quickly drop affected leaves and replace them with new ones.
I mention these other possibilities because it’s been well established that Redhaven peach is self-fertile. In self-fertile blooms like peaches, the flowers are “complete” which means they contain both male and female parts. The pollen only has to move a matter of millimeters from the anthers to the pistil. That’s why wind is enough to do it.
I could envision a scenario where the flowers stayed so wet that virtually no pollen was ever given the opportunity to become airborne, but I think in that hypothetical, the disease pressure would be so high, the blooms would probably die from disease pressure anyway. Peach flowers are a very delicate part of a peach tree and can be negatively affected by many things.
Thanks for the reply, Olpea. My peach trees always have plenty of flowers, and I’ve never seen any sign of frost damage. After blooming, the flowers develop small fruitlets that mostly drop off after a few weeks; the same thing happens to most of the sweet cherry flowers, just not quite as extensively.
If what you say about self-fertile flowers is true, I should be able to get a better crop by hand pollinating. I’ll try it next spring to see if it makes a difference. I think that I tried hand pollinating years ago and didn’t find it useful, but I’m not sure about that.
Another possibility is that the poor fruit set is due to the effect of Coryneum Blight. When I first planted a peach tree in my back yard over 45 years ago, I used to get some great crops; but, after a few years the blight arrived and kept getting worse and spread to adjacent stone fruit trees. This year, I sprayed my new tree (planted in 2021) with copper in the spring, after an earlier spray last fall. I saw no sign of blight or PLC this year, and the tree provided 4 good peaches, which might be a good sign.
That’s good to hear. Juvenile peach trees frequently abort much of their fruitlets, even in year 3 and 4.
What you are describing sounds like button fruit. It’s generally caused by frosts after bloom, but can also occur because of wet cold weather during bloom, which inhibits self-fertilization. In either case, the embryo is not viable, so the peach fruitlet doesn’t grow and is aborted.
It’s known that wet weather inhibits pollination. I’ve just never seen it drastically affect yield here on peaches. I wonder if it’s a combination of your Coryneum Blight and the lack of fertilization because of wet weather.
Olpea, your description of button fruit makes sense in the PNW climate, where spring is almost alway cool and wet. I assume that various fruit species and varieties are more or less susceptible to fertilization failure in cool weather. The most notable example that I know about is my Santa Rosa plum tree, which only bears a decent crop when a cool, wet early spring delays blooming for a while, followed by a sudden change to warm and dry conditions for the rest of spring. This has only happened 3 or 4 times in the 45+ years that I’ve had the tree, but other Japanese plum grafts on the same tree that bloom at the same time have been bearing excessive fruitings that have to be heavily thinned.
I think that hand pollinating the peach flowers next spring should determine if the poor peach crop is due to cool weather or lack of pollinators, assuming that fungal diseases are kept under control.