Pollinating Apple Trees Without Bees

Everybody has heard about the declining number of bees in the world. Weather it has to do with using insecticides, no natural areas for them, or there is a virus going around that is killing many of these bees. No matter how its happening, there are thousands of hives that are being lost constantly. If we don't have bees, then we don't have fruit. It doesn't matter if it's a peach tree that is self pollinating because either way everything needs bees. But there are apple trees that cross pollinate. They need apples from different areas and they have to have different DNA to generate fruit. You have to have to apple trees to produce fruit.

Unfortunately whats happening, in areas there there are no natural bees, they are not getting fruits on the trees at all. This could become a huge world issue in the future if something is not done about it. There actually is hope. In areas like Szechuan, China, they have used so many insecticides and pollutants that there are actually no bees at all in these areas. The apples are not producing any fruit. In turn there are no apple trees producing fruit in that whole province of China. They did figure out there is a way in which humans can pollinate the trees without the bees.

In order for humans to pollinate the trees, they take a big piece of bamboo and put a feather on the very end of it. A couple days later as soon as the blossoms open, they actually take the bamboo with the feather and rub the pollen on the feather. They then take that pollen and put it in a dish and let it dry for two or three days. This becomes very powdery. They then turn around and put it back onto the feather which in turn goes up into the trees and gets rubbed on the stylus. To get up into these trees they use very large ladders.