Avocado flowers need pollinators. Honeybees move pollen from flower to flower as they forage, fertilizing the blooms that become fruit. Without that work, fruit set drops and yields follow — for a crop as pollination-dependent as avocados, bees are the difference between a good harvest and a thin one.
It's a neat fit with how avocados bloom, too: neighboring trees open male and female flower phases at different times of day, so bees working across the grove are constantly cross-pollinating. We wrote more about that strange flowering cycle here.
The Challenges
Bee populations are under real pressure — habitat loss, pesticide exposure, disease, and a shifting climate. Less reliable pollination means less reliable harvests. Every avocado grower has a stake in this, whether they keep hives or not.
What We're Doing
As we rehabilitate the grove, we're building pollinator habitat into the plan: diverse flowering plants in the understory instead of bare dirt, so bees have forage beyond the avocado bloom. A grove that's good for bees is a grove that sets more fruit.