Question: How long does it normally take for bees to pollanate your plants?

John Paterson answered on 10 Jun 2019:

That’s a good question, because the amount of pollination a plant needs changes a lot depending on what plant you’re talking about. It’s also a question that we don’t know the answer to for a lot of plants, so there’s still lots of research to do in this area.

Normally for my plants the flowers only last about 3 days each (although the plant continues to make flowers for months), so pollination has to happen within 3 days. However a single bee can pollinate a flower very quickly, within a few seconds when visiting. One of the things I’m looking at is whether my plants produce a lot of seeds if they’ve just been visited once, or whether it takes lots of visits from lots of pollinators to get them to produce lots of seeds.

Other flowers can take longer to pollinate. Some flowers are difficult to pollinate on purpose so that they are only visited by certain kinds of pollinators – snapdragons are a common garden flower that can only be pollinated by bees because flies aren’t strong enough to open them. Some flowers are incredibly complicated – slipper orchids trap bees and flies inside them overnight and then force them to escape through a narrow part of the flower that covers them in pollen. So the length and kind of pollination a flower needs changes a lot between plants.