Greetings from the Kerio Valley in Northwestern Kenya. This beautiful valley, an extension of the magnificent Great Rift Valley, is one of my favorite places. It is a veritable paradise for bees and other insects that live in the valleys’ forests, acacia-woodlands and rugged escarpments.
The Kerio Valley is also home to thousands of small-scale farmers. One of the crops grown here is Passionfruit. This delicious fruit comes from a creeper that bears spectacular and complex flowers that require insect pollination in order to produce yields.
At this particular site I found lots of honeybees visiting the passionfruit flowers:
Large numbers of honeybees were present on this sunny morning at the passionfruit flowers:
The bees were working hard collecting pollen by scraping it from the flowers’ anthers and then combing it into their pollen baskets (the yellow blobs on their hind-legs). In so doing, they transfer pollen between plants and pollinate the flowers, producing the delicious passion fruits that we so love. Here is a video of them hard at work:
These farms have bumper yields of passionfruits thanks to the bees.
But what helps make the bees visit the farms? The crop is only in flower occasionally, and bees need food year round at this site. The answer to this is simple: the abundant weeds and wildflowers in the fallow maize fields that surround the passionfruit farms.
Weeds are often seen as ‘the enemy’ by farmers, but they are important for supporting useful insects like honeybees and other pollinators.
The yellow wildflowers at this site were visited by the honeybees after they were done working on the passionfruit flowers…
Next time you enjoy a passionfruit – remember who to thank!
More from the wonderful world of dudus soon!