I saw a few wasps but those things are retards when it comes to pollinating plants. They fly all around all over the plants, tapping up the stems and across the leaves with no concern for the flowers whatsoever.
Yesterday I noticed a hummingbird but it zipped along the backside of the flowers, not the front, not going flower to flower, just quickly scanning the backs. It was ugly and plain brown.
Then tonight I saw a hummingbird moth, a species of sphinx moth that looks like a hummingbird. Is that cool or what? Two cool things in one, hummingbird and sphinx. They're awesome. A bit smaller than the bird and grey color. The ones that I saw over years come out at twilight. They're enchanting. Their caterpillar form is large and green. Oh man, that's the thing that ate five of my mint plants. Stripped each one bare. Finally the caterpillar could be seen. Stretched out on a stem.
I picked it off and ate it.
And that's how I attained my superpower of minty fresh breath.
Zucchinis have two types of flowers, a male flower and a female flower. The female flower forms at the end of an ovule, an incipient zucchini fruit that wilts if the flower is not pollinated. The male flower forms on the end of a thin stem. You can pick off a male flower and push its anther onto the stigma of the female flower. So they bump uglies and get pollen all over the place just like humans do. Normally bees do this messy job but whatcha gonna do when you got no bees?
The Denver Art Museum has bees in their flower beds but they cannot be bothered to fly all the way over here across the street just for one little balcony.
I picked the shortest videos because we gardener types talk way too much. Even the shortest videos are all yakkity-yak-yak with extra crap. Each video could be five seconds.
Eggplant, hand pollinate.
One time a long time ago a Spanish guy was sitting on a porch in Mexico that was covered with vanilla bean orchids vines. He noticed one specific type of bee was pollinating the flowers that bloomed only for one night. He watched this bee parade night after night during the summer.
He went, "Doggoneit, I just now realized the vanilla bean secret."
The vanilla beans form as green beans in clusters, but the original flowers bloom sequentially similar to Morning Glories. It's such a bummer to have the flowers last only one night, but they grow in clusters, so there are always flowers in various stages of development and after a week or so the cluster turns out fairly even. But that one bee thing and one night blooming thing is still extremely specific.
It takes a squadron of bees or an entire plantation of slaves.
When vanilla plants were removed from Mexico and grown elsewhere the knowledge of the specific vanilla bean bees did not go with them. Vast plantations of vanilla orchids were painstakingly hand-pollinated by slaves returning to the same plants and the same cluster of flowers night after night. They're incredibly labor intensive.
And that's just the beginning.
Once the beans are fully grown they are basically fermented similar to chocolate. The long beans are spread out in the sun and rolled up into their tarps and stored inside each night, day in, day out, sometimes for months until they age, turn brown and shrivel and wrinkle. You cannot just pick them and sell them.
So when you pay $1.00 per vanilla bean on eBay recall all that goes into them and understand that's actually a pretty good bargain.
In Mexico there is such an extreme problem of green vanilla bean rustling that each bean is actually branded while still on the vine. They get a dot-matrix number singed into them as they're still growing. Farmers do a similar green bean branding in Madagascar. Thieves all over the place.
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