This is how the entire valley of central California looked about 3 weeks ago! February and March are bloom season. This pix was taken from the roof of our house. The bees were out there in great numbers cross-polinating the trees! There are beekeepers who are hired to truck in their bees sometimes from as far away as our neighboring states to place their bees on ranches for the purpose of pollinating. This is very important to the nut development. The bees get the pollen on their feet and carry it to another row of trees which has a different variety of almonds in it's row. This is called cross-pollenating. Now the trees have dropped the petals and due to the pollination a few weeks before, there is a little nutlet forming at the center of what was a white flower. They will grow and grow until around August when they are harvested.
Lori Braden
4 comments:
Now I have to comment on my own posting to clarify that it was I, Lori, who posted the last photo with information, not Jaye. I'll get this figured out YET!
And in case you were wondering why I used THREE different spellings for the word pollinate it's obviously because I was uncertain as to the spelling. However, when I looked the word up in Websters, the root word is Pollen
(with an 'e') use the word Pollinate you must change the 'e' to an 'i'. Now as to why I used only one 'l' to spell the word...Websters doesn't address this quirk! :-)
hey i took that picture! yeah!
Good job, Nick
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