Bees in greenhouse? What have u tried?

[Tropicaltoba]

Hello all,
I am curious about what peoples experience has been with bees in their greenhouse? I have a year round greenhouse and try to provide 12 months of flowering species for some hoverflies and predatory wasps that help with my aphids. They (hoverflies) are very selective pollinators ( citrus and Longan only that I can tell) and I need something to help me with my passion fruit trellis which is almost out of reach.

[Plantinyum]

From my limited knowledge regarding bees in general, for a closed environment i think you should look into the tropical or small familly/stingles bees. Ive watched videos of such species, their colonies are nowhere near as big as europian bees for instance. For a greenhouse a standart europian bee colony will get starved to death, i dont know if bee colonies grow proportionally to their environment, so it may be possible to raise them with a limited amount of food/flowers.
For the passion fruit i would suggest to do a hand pollination ,if you have acess to the flowers. In my opinion thats the 100% sure way that u get alot of fruit, that will be worth the trouble to grow a passion fruit out of its native climate.

[MisterPlantee]

You can buy those little all in one bumblebee boxes which contain a queen, workers and food. They are sold for pollinating commercial greenhouses. In Canada you can get Naturpol branded ones through Koppert. I have wanted to get one just to see how they are like but they have like 100 bees so that might bee too many for a small greenhouse. Bumblebees are what pollinate passion flowers, the other bees are usually not big enough to pollinate them.

[fruitnut1944]

I've used a class C hive of bumblebees in my GH many years. They only survive and reproduce for about 5 weeks of pollination. That's just right for stone fruit which was my main crop needing pollination. If anything they were too many bees for my 1700 sqft GH. I ended up killing a good number of the bees. They over worked many flowers but it didn't really seem to hurt fruit set.

Year around pollination in a GH will take a special bee. Maybe it exists but I don't know what that would be. I tried mason bees before the bumblebees. That was a total failure. Honeybees don't like being in a greenhouse. Big operations like tomato growers don't use them even in GH that cover acres.

[Tropicaltoba]

Fruitnut, thanks for the info with the mason bees. How did u did them a failure?

[fruitnut1944]

The Mason bees never hatched out. I've not heard much positive about using them.

Hand pollination works. On large flowered fruits that's a good option. It's tedious on small flowers like stone fruit.

[Tropicaltoba]

Fruitnut- I actually enjoy going around hand pollinating. It would just be cool do be able to have a small number of bees. I love watching my hoverflys they have super interesting behaviours and signalling mechanisms.

[palmcity]

I've used a class C hive of bumblebees in my GH many years. They only survive and reproduce for about 5 weeks of pollination. That's just right for stone fruit which was my main crop needing pollination. If anything they were too many bees for my 1700 sqft GH. I ended up killing a good number of the bees. They over worked many flowers but it didn't really seem to hurt fruit set.

Year around pollination in a GH will take a special bee. Maybe it exists but I don't know what that would be. I tried mason bees before the bumblebees. That was a total failure. Honeybees don't like being in a greenhouse. Big operations like tomato growers don't use them even in GH that cover acres.

IMO a bumblebee sting is 10 times worse than a honey bee sting. Under a piece of wood in a barn was a huge colony of bumblebees. I filled a gallon of water with my favorite pesticide and threw something at the wood... Sure enough they came up from the ground looking like the war ships on "The Wrath of Khan" hoovering in front of me and then zooming in for the kill... It almost made me surrender as I ran after being hit by one.

Way to painful for me to ever experience again.

Interesting about the shipping of a colony... For others here's a nice read:::  https://wormman.blog/product/bumble-bee-hive-class-c/

https://www.domyown.com/koppert-natupol-class-bumblebee-hive-for-less-than-5000-sq-ft-p-11622.html