Slide 8 of 17

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Slide 8 of 17

Notes:

In this and the next three graphs, the x axis is the number of flowers in bloom on a raceme, and the y axis is the percent of all racemes that have x number of flowers in bloom. I’ve plotted the distributions for the commercial fields that we monitored (see the previous slide show for methods, and total flower abundance). Each symbol represents a different field. The solid line is the average. For example, on average only 4% of the racemes have a single flower in bloom in the figure above. Early in the season before the bees have done much pollinating there is great variability in flowers per raceme, with low percentages of racemes having everything from one flower to 25. Actually I’ve truncated the distribution; there are some racemes with up to 40 flowers. These are the distributions the first week that bees were released into the field. The distribution is flat because flowers are accumulating without being pollinated. As pollination increases, ...