Hand Pollination In China, in the world's pear capital, it is
the farmers who carry out the pollination of the trees: costly and
painstaking work that replaces the bees killed by pesticides.
The city of Hanyuan, dressed in the finery of the white
blossoms on the pear trees, could make us believe in the eternal China
with its red and black brick roofs and the grandeur of its foggy
landscapes. But don't let yourself be misled. It was agricultural
reform instituted by the "Great Helmsman" that made the city the pear
capital of Sichuan at the beginning of the 1980s. Perched at 1600
metres altitude, Hanyuan transformed its rice paddies into orchards.
At the time, pears sold for 4 to 5 times the price of rice because
China had to feed its population, which had tripled in ten years,
going from 400 million to 1.2 billion. Today, with 7% of the world's
cultivated land, the country has to feed 22% of the world's
population. The blossoming period of the pear trees is a
crucial season, the one for pollination. Pear trees are
auto-incompatible, which means that the trees need a hybrid
pollination to produce fruit in good quantity and of a good size.
Natural pollinators like bees have disappeared from the valley, killed
or chased away by the pesticides that the farmers use on their crops.
So, Chinese agricultural engineers replaced the insects with people
and hand-pollination has spread in the valley and throughout the
province of Sichuan. In the Cheng Su family's orchard, they
have been busy for several days now. The couple, for whom half their
yearly income comes from the sale of five tons of pears, are
pollinating one by one the flowers on their trees at a rate of thirty
or so trees per day. The husband climbs the trees while his wife takes
care of the lower branches, for 5 to 6 hours a day during the hottest
hours of the day. This year, the season started late, the snow and
cold lasting until early March. The first blossoms opened quickly,
just after the thaw. Just as quickly, the family gathered the flowers
from the early blooming pear trees in the house's courtyard to obtain
the pollen necessary for the pollination. Once gathered, the pollen is
dried under a heating cover. The prepared pollen is in fact a mix of
pollen, pistils and stamens and its colour is brown, rarely yellow.
