266 Cucumber Growing Basics

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred is brought to you by SmartPots, the original lightweight long-lasting fabric plant container. It's made in the USA. Visit smartpots.com slash Fred for more information and a special discount, that's smartpots.com slash Fred. ♪ Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information, well, you've come to the right spot. ♪ According to one recent national poll of backyard gardeners, cucumbers are the second favorite crop for growing. In a poll conducted by the National Gardening Association, 86% of gardeners cited growing tomatoes as their favorite, but coming in its second place, cucumbers. Well, we've talked about tomatoes extensively on this podcast, but how do you grow and enjoy cucumbers? We've got the varieties, the growing techniques, the harvesting tips, and advice on how to get rid of any bitterness of certain cucumbers. America's favorite retired college, horticultural professor Debbie Flower, he happens to be an avowed fan of the cucumber. So who better to turn to for cucumber growing basics? Plus, have you ever wondered how bees communicate to the other bees that maybe they've found a site filled with pollen-rich plants? They go back to the hive and they do the waggle dance. We talked to a bee expert who has studied these intricate dance moves. It's all in today's episode 266, Cucumber Growing Basics. We're podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Abutilon jungle in suburban purgatory. It's the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred Podcast brought to you today by Smart Potts and Dave Wilson Nursery. Let's go. ♪♪♪ While back, we were talking about the top 10 vegetables that are grown by gardeners in these United States. And I was surprised to learn that the number two most popular vegetable grown in the United States are cucumbers. Who knew? I thought it would be peppers or maybe zucchini. No, zucchini was number six. Sweet peppers were number three. Cucumbers were number two. I'm not a big fan of cucumbers, but I know someone who is. Yeah. I love cucumbers. That would be Debbie Flower, America's favorite retired college, horticultural professor who loves cucumbers. I do. And my heavens, cucumbers have a lot of problems and I bet sometime this summer we're going to hear from people who say, what happened to my cucumbers? So the flowers look funny, the fruit looks funny. Tastes bad. Tastes bad. What's going on? What's going on? Yeah. Well, cucumbers are a vine. And so they need some space. They are in the Cucur-Bite family. And so they have boy flowers and girl flowers. And that's part of the pollination problem. And they need regular moisture. If you let the plants dry out between irrigations, that's when your fruit tastes bad. There's more and more breeding going on to prevent that. We're getting closer to being able to have more erratic watering, but basically you need to have the soil needs to be moist, not wet, but moist all the time. So cucumbers are a warm season plant, a warm season annual. They need soil temperatures to be quite warm when you seed them and you typically want to direct seed them, not start them ahead of time. Sounds like zucchini. Like zucchini, like melons, like pumpkins. Those plants are all similar in that when they get root bound in a container, it dwarfs them and they will never grow very big. And you do it once in your gardening life and you remember it, man. It's such a disappointment. So just tried my second time planting my cucumber seeds yesterday. I planted some old seeds and that might be my problem. Seeds in general, you don't want to keep more than two years. These were two-year-old seeds and I stored them correctly, dry in the refrigerator over the two years, but they just didn't germinate. So yesterday I planted fresh seed. So I would advise starting with fresh seed. Plant them directly when your night temperatures have settled at 50 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit. They need six to eight hours of sun. That's considered full sun. And well-drained fertile soil and regular moisture. Can you grow them in containers? You can. There are some bush type cucumbers that are smaller and can be grown in containers. The containers should be pretty big. 15 to 25 in each of them. Yes, half barrel. Yeah. Make sure they have drainage holes and if they're a dark color on the outside, wrap them in aluminum foil. There you go. Or paint them white or put something, some light color on the outside somehow. According to the cucumber heads at UC Davis for containers, they like these cucumbers. Pickle bush, potluck, parks bush whopper, salad bush, space master and bush champion. Notice the word bush a lot. Yeah. I'm going to tell you something about that. I would think though that much like zucchini, some early season disappointments with cucumbers would be, you see the flowers, you get excited, but either there's no fruit, or what fruit develops doesn't look very good. And doesn't last. Yeah. It's very small and it turns yellow and falls off. Right. That's because they have, it has two types of flowers. It has the male flower and the female flower. And the flowers themselves to the untrained eye look exactly the same. But it's when you look at the stem that attaches the flower to the plant that you get your clue. A male flower is attached with a straight stem and a female flower is attached with what looks like a baby cucumber. And that's it's the fruit will form if it gets pollinated. So actually the insides of the flowers are different from each other. One has the pollen and one has the stigmatic surface that receives the pollen and allows the pollination to occur and the fruit to form. So it's a morning job for home for the pollinator, which can be bees or can be you. And often the first, this is another thing they worked on a lot in breeding. So it isn't quite as pronounced as it used to be, but the first whole bunch of flowers used to all be males. Now it's the first few and there were no females in sight, but the pollen has to be ripe and the stigmatic surface has to be receptive. And there has to be a pollinator there to move the pollen from the boy flower to the girl flower. So it's a morning job. You can get up, go outside. I take off the male flower, take off the petals and touch the tip of the male flower to the inside of the female flower. And that transfers the pollen and then you're going to get fruit. You don't even need an artist brush. No, you don't. No, that's pretty nifty doing that way. I would think though that weather plays a big part in it too, that these flowers are only going to develop when the temperature is in a certain range. Right. These are warm season crops. And so if you have very fluctuating temperatures, you may not get them. If it's too cold or too hot, either the male or the female won't cooperate. Right. It's probably the female that isn't cooperating. I'd say the male. I know they always want to play, but... Yeah, we're always ready. But no, it's too hot and they get headaches or something. I don't know. Blossom and rot. I wouldn't think Blossom and rot would be a problem outside of tomatoes and peppers. I've seen it on squash. Yeah. Yeah, I had one growing and it appeared in a compost pile. I just let it grow and it got Blossom and rot. And that is, you'll read that it is due to calcium insufficiency in the fruit. And that's probably what it is. But in most cases, there's enough calcium available in the soil for plants to take it up. There's just not a regular source of water to take it to the plant roots. And so it comes back to regular watering again. When choosing a cucumber variety, we talked about what's best for like a container, the bush types. Mm-hmm. But for consumption, what is the difference between a slicing cucumber and a pickling cucumber? As far as I know it's size, the pickling cucumbers tend to only grow to be cigar size or smaller, what, few inches, four to six inches and not really fat. I don't know if anybody else remembers getting the cucumber out of the barrel in the local store. Boy, for a second there, I thought you were going to say crackerjack box. I never got one of those in a crackerjack box. But if you have that experience, you can picture the size of the cucumber. What we buy in the store now is all cut up in various ways. But I have pickled cucumbers that are regular slicing cucumbers. And I probably didn't get the texture. That would be pickled kind of sore might look for because the amount of water in the fruit, etc., etc. But I just would pick them young and pickle them or slice them and pickle them when there were a lot left. One nice thing about cucumbers is because they require warm soil in order to get started. They actually mature rather quickly. Yeah, they're fast growers. They take off once they're out of the ground as long as they have nutritious soil and one about an inch of water a week. So what, two months or so? Two months to get a fruit, yeah? Yeah, okay. All right, so you could plant in June and have cucumbers by the end of August. Yes. So you could do cucumber planting season then. Do you plant them the same way that you would plant zucchini or summer squash six on a hill and then thin out to the strongest one? Or ignore them? I don't see discussion of the hill as much, but several in one location and then thin out and then you need to space them. Depending on whether you're going to trellis them, they could be as little as a 12 inches apart if you're going to grow a vine in cucumber on a trellis. Although I find that little close or letting them sprawl across the ground in which they need to be five or six feet apart. That brings up another good point. We have received a lot of emails in the past of people who grow cucumbers on trellises and they seem to really like that. Yes, I like that. Tell us about that. They have tendrils which occur in the leaf node where the leaf is attached and they can wrap themselves around something thin. They can't wrap themselves around, let's say, a piece of bamboo. That's a little too big, but something thin like a cattle panel or string. Some people make a structure and have string hanging down from it and when they touch it's a plant response to touch. They'll wind themselves around the trellis. If you don't have the right diameter thing for the tendril to twist around you can always use... I used to use old stockings, which I don't wear anymore, to encase the fruit and tie it up or to tie the plant itself to the structure that you're using as a trellis. Here in the 21st century we would use out of date USB cables. There you go. Or I've seen this is for melon, but baby underwear. Children's underwear to cradle the fruit. Oh, that's clever. Yes, I thought so. Out at the Faroaks Horticulture Center they have repurposed some old umbrella frames. You know how umbrellas get torn in the wind, but the frame is intact. They have mounted these umbrellas in the soil and run strings down from the bare arms around each. Anchored the strings or small rope into the ground and allow either beans or cucumbers or whatever to... Very clever. ...spiral their way up to the top. Nice. I would think I would want something stronger like you mentioned, a piece of cattle fencing or some sort of 12 gauge wire, 6 inch mesh, maybe even concrete reinforcement wire, which is a little flimsy. Right. But you could still do it that way. One year I grew it on a trellis that went above my head and of course the plant grew up there and then I couldn't reach the fruit. So beware. Okay, yeah, I wonder if we would work on a pallet that has been placed on an angle and supported by T-posts. We talked about that with Gail Pothauer recently, Master Gardener. She was using it to grow butter belly squash. Okay. And it had no trouble attaching to the wooden slats of the pallet and crawled right up. No, I don't know if a cucumber would do that because you said it couldn't grip a bit. Yeah, a tendril but a squash typically has a tendril as well. Yeah. So maybe the roughness of the wood leaves a little splinter set they can wrap around. Both for the plant and in your hand. Yes, right. All right. I'm pretty picky about who I allow to advertise on this podcast. My criteria though is pretty simple. It has to be a product I like, a product I use, and a product I would buy again. 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To find a store near you or to buy online, visit smartpots.com. And don't forget that slash Fred part. On that page or details about how for a limited time you can get 10% off your smart pot order by using the coupon code FRED. Use it at checkout from the smart pot store. Visit smartpots.com. Let's talk about some cucumber pests that might come your way. According to the University of California's Integrated Pest Management site, among many of the most important things to do is to get a smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller plants that are available at the start of the year. Let's talk about some cucumber pests that might come your way. According to the University of California's Integrated Pest Management site, among the invertebrate pests that can attack your cucumbers, it includes aphids, armyworms, crickets, cucumber beetles, cutworms, darkling beetles, dried fruit beetles, airwigs, flea beetles, grass hoppers, leaf hoppers, leaf miners, loopers, nematodes, seed corn maggots, snails and slugs, spider mites, squash bugs, stink bug thrips, white flies, wire worms. What are your favorites on that list? That's a lot of things. A lot of those are sort of, I want to say generalized pest problems like aphids. You'll see on many things, cutworms are just like seedlings. And so when you plant the seed in the ground, you put a collar around it of some sort. I have this box of mini-dixie cups in my house and I came across and thought, what do I have that for? Well, I used to pop the bottoms out and put the little cup around the seedling because cutworms have to push it into the soil, cutworms travel near the surface of the soil over to the seedling and chew around the stem. Do earwigs do the same? Earwigs get a bad rap because they are usually going after dead organic matter and they're only going to go after a plant if there's nothing else there. Right. If you don't have a lot of organic matter for them to eat, then they'll go after a plant. Right. So a dixie cup would solve that issue for that. Well, I suppose so. I don't think they could get into, they climb. You find them in buds and things, but I don't know if they could climb a dixie cup. The other thing my mother used to use was half toilet, the toilet paper tube that's left over when the toilet paper is gone. And that's another way to trap earwigs as well. Yes it is. If you put moist. Yeah, moisten it up and stick it in a dark place near where they are. They might just crawl in it. They go in there during the day. Yeah. Yes. So that's a possibility. However, you bring up an interesting new sport that may take off in fraternities, which would be to take a dixie cup, put it upside down and have earwig races to see if they can crawl up and an ear, a dixie cup, especially if it's actually placed upright over a plant, because that way they'd have to sort of. That's to grow out. Yeah, they'd have to climb out. Right. And it's waxy. Yeah. And you know, you could toughen it up by having a moat below that of vegetable oil that they would drown in. Yeah, they fell. That would be the end. Yeah. So. Right. So they're going to have a lot of different types of things. So they're going to have a lot of different types of things. So they're going to have different types of things. So they're going to have different types of things. So they're going to have different types of things. So they're going to have different types of things. So they're going to have different types of things. So they're going to have different types of things. So they're going to have different types of things. So they're going to have different types of things. So they're going to have different types of things. So they're going to have different types of things. So they're going to have different types of things. So they're going to have different types of things. So they're going to have different types of things. So they're going to have different types of things. But they also have a lot of close relatives as well. The squash bugs go after that as well. And the problem with cucumber beetles is just glancing at it. You might say, oh, look at the cute ladybug. And it's not a ladybug. Right. It's a western spotted cucumber beetle. Right. And there are spotted ones and striped ones. And they can introduce a bacterium into the plant. So that is one that you really want to have some control over. Now it says here, according to the University of California, that most older plants can support substantial numbers without serious damage. The best strategy for most vegetable gardens may be to place protective cloth over emerging plants and remove it when the plants are old enough to tolerate damage. There you go. Row covers. Row covers, yes. Yeah. That would work for a lot of pests. Yes, it does. It keeps them away. Well, since we're on the subject of bad voodoo for cucumbers, the diseases that can strike cucumbers as they're growing. And cucumbers as they're growing in your yard with sad names like damping off powdery mildew, downy mildew, fatophthoroc, root rot. Wow. Well, that's, again, I mean, they're susceptible obviously, but that's, yeah, that's a soil-borne disease that in areas where there's too much water. And we talked about having to water those cucumbers a lot. And there are some issues with it. One would be phytophthoroc, another would be fusarium or cilium, which are also soil-borne. And if you know you have those problems, especially the fusarium and verticillium, you can get resistant cultivars. So look for letters like V, F, or N. Right. Right. Next one. Diseases, right. Yeah. The phytophthoroc is kind of, many plants get it and you need a lot of standing water. Another plant problem for cucumbers is alternaria. It's a leaf spot that the older leaves will turn brown and get and start to fall off. And that's due to over, that needs water. And many diseases do. Bacterial and fungal needs standing water, meaning a droplet of water, on the plant in order for the spore of the disease to germinate and enter the plant. And so if you're irrigating overhead, and I do, I use micro emitters. I know you don't, but I do in my garden. And so it sprays on the plants. The plants do get wet. And so that wetness can allow the diseases to form, but I make sure that I water very early in the morning and I live in a very dry climate. And so by the time the sun is up, I've just watered and it dries up so fast that these diseases can't infect the plants. If you're in a much more humid place, that's not going to happen necessarily. You're not going to get that drying to happen. And you're probably going to get more rain, which is, can cause that water to be there for the diseases to form. And so you may need to increase your spacing so that the plant can get more airflow. And trellising would be a really good idea so that the plant can get more airflow and it can all dry out and then look for those resistant cultivars. Yeah, I'm surprised at some of the recommendations on the back of some seed packets for cucumbers talk about a spay thin them out so that they're five feet apart. Yeah, that would be if you're not, I would think if you're not trellising them. Right. Although the plants, you know, we put them in and we've got these little tiny plants, but they get big by the end of the season. Well, there's that too. And then there's the process of thinning them out. And not much like zucchini is, oh, I'm not going to hurt that little plant. Right. People don't want to thin. Thinning should be cutting the plant at the soil level with a sharp tool like scissors or pruning shears. Leaving the roots alone so that you're not disturbing the roots of the one you're keeping. And I don't know how many people I've said that to. And then I watch them pull the plant out and move it to some place else. People don't. Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Yeah. People don't want to kill the plant. And I understand that completely. But realize I don't plant according to the, to the package directions. I don't plant three to a hill and then take two out or whatever. If I'm suspicious that my seed is, is old and not going to grow very well or it's a something that's difficult to get to germinate, I will plant more than one, but then I'll come back and cut that puppy out the extra one. By the way, she doesn't literally mean a puppy. Oh, I don't know. I'll cut that plant out, but I don't like some seed packages will say plant one every two inches and then come back and thin to every 12 inches. Like really, I should regularly get rid of all these extra plants. They're in business to make money. They are. Realize that when you read the seed packets. Seed packets are wonderful. They have so much information. They're so worth reading. And I love reading them, but some stuff like that irritates me. Yeah. I can understand that. One of the more common complaints about cucumbers though is as they mature and the folks go to bite into it, it's bitter. Yeah. What causes the bitterness and how do you get rid of it? It's the irregular watering that causes the bitterness and I've heard of all kinds of things and I don't know if they're all old wives tales or what, but it's pretty difficult to get rid of it. Removing the skin can help. I had a friend who said cut off the end just a little bit of the end and then rub it back and forth over what's left and you'll get this frothy stuff and that gets rid of the bitterness. I'm not sure. Something to cutting it off, to cutting off the ends and taking the skin off. Yes. That helps remove some of the bitterness. Not always all of it though. So the bitterness occurs mostly in the stem end. So that's the end of the fruit that was attached to the plant. And the skin. So if you do get a bitter cucumber and I've actually purchased one or two from the grocery store and then found them to be such, yeah, you want to take that stem end off and a little bit of the fruit and then peel the cucumber completely and if it's still better maybe peel another layer off. So the stem end would be the end that doesn't come to a point. You would have a scar on it. Right. Yes. Yes. I would think too that harvesting when they're fairly young might help mitigate bitterness problems. Sure. Because it's a chemical that forms over time in the fruit and the longer it stays on the plant the more of that chemical that can form. So, slicing cucumbers probably eight to ten inches is harvest time. Right. Not. I grow Chelsea prize and they can get to be fifteen inches. If you go disappear for a day. Yes. Yeah. And the pickling types, even small, you'd harvest those. Right. Those are about three or four inches. You're right. Little ones. Yeah. Okay. I imagine cucumbers do not play well with weeds either. So you do want to weed any patch where you're going to plant cucumbers. Right. Especially if it's bindweed or bermutagrass. The cucumbers are heavy feeders and they want everything to themselves they don't share well. You have a, you mentioned, you haven't mentioned them all in one place though. Your favorite cucumber varieties. I've done straight eight quite a bit and, but my favorite is Chelsea prize. I try another one periodically and then I come back to Chelsea prize. When we were talking to Gail Poth our master gardener and vegetable had a few weeks ago about cucumbers. She likes to grow heirloom cucumbers and her favorites were green fingers, silver slicer, alibi and the Armenian cucumber. I don't like Armenian. I grew them one year and I didn't like them at all. I don't know what it is about me and that one. Burpless cucumbers? Is there such a thing? There are many that are marketed as burpless. I don't have the burping problem. Okay. So I can't attest to whether, how, uh, effective they are. Cucumbers though, if you're fond of it, you can grow it and then when you harvest it, I guess you can eat it fresh, put it into stir fry or, or make pickles. Or salads sir. Some good cucumber salads with dill and yogurt. Mmm. Okay. Why did you just throw tuna in the mix too? Oh, that sounds good. Alright. Anything else on cucumbers? Uh, if you're growing the cucumber, well, either try listening or on the ground, mulching the soil is a good idea. It helps retain the moisture that you have applied to the soil, slows down the loss of moisture from that soil and we know we want that even moisture for the plant so that we don't get the, the bitterness. The other is if you are allowing the, the plant to grow on the ground as a market farmer might be able to, because it takes more time and effort to trellis a cucumber, but you still will want to go around and maybe put some straw underneath each fruit so that they do not rot from touching that moist soil. I'm waiting for your annual vegetable buying advice when you go to a nursery how to pick out a cucurbert plant. Good point. Because it's not easy. Uh, I prefer to direct seed them because if there are too many leaves, true leaves on the plant, it's an indication the plant is root bound and it will never grow very big. So what's that mean? Often they're sold in a three or four inch pot. That's the distance across the top of the pot. And they often look like they've just germinated. So they will have what are called the cotyledons. They're two bean like each one looks like a half of a bean. That's the seed food that came in the seed that the plant started from. And then they'll have what are the true leaves which tend to be have pointy tips to them and they might be hairy. And three, I wouldn't buy anything with more than three true leaves. So it'd be two cotyledons plus three true leaves in a three or four inch pot. And if I'm feeling bold, I'll just knock that puppy out of the pot carefully, correctly, putting my hand over the top, my fingers around the stem, tipping the whole thing over as if I were pouring it out, squeeze the container, pull it off. It will the media will be fairly well knitted together by the roots and look at that root system. If there are lots of roots on the outside of that bunch of media, I just poured out. I won't buy that plant, especially if those roots are going round and rounded. Yes. Yeah. Can you really untangle a squash plant or a cucumber plant or does that damage the roots? That would damage the roots cutting the roots, which I do with great regularity on anything I plant would also damage the roots. And at that, they just can't take it. I did it once. I probably started it myself in a container and put it in the ground and the leaves never got bigger than my hand and cucumber leaves can get very big. And the vine never got more than three feet long. So again, with cucumbers, plant it directly and regular water. Very regular water. Yes. Very regular water. Yes. I think would that be a reason for bitterness as well? If it was irregular watering? Yes. Irregular watering and the blossom and rot would be irregular watering. But you don't want water. It's sitting in water. You want it well drained. So if you have soil that retains a lot of moisture like clay soil, make a mound and plant on the top of the mound. I tell you what, those container grown cucumbers sound better in bed. Yeah, easier, huh? Yeah. Except for the moisture. It's hard to keep a container moist. Yes, it is. But again, a pot inside a pot. Yes. Can help. All right. Number two most popular backyard garden vegetable grown. You might want to give it a try this year. Thanks, Debbie. Thank you, Fred. Are you thinking of growing fruit trees? Maybe you already are, but you'll want to know more about them. Well, you probably have a million questions like which fruit trees will grow where I live. What are the tastiest fruits? When's harvest time? How do I care for these trees? The good news is the answers are all nearby. Just go to Dave Wilson dot com, click on the home garden tab at the top of the page. And in that home garden tab, you're going to find a link to their fruit and that harvest chart so you can be picking delicious, healthy fruits from your own yard for a long growing season here in USDA zone nine. That could be May through December and you're just a click away with the informative YouTube video series at Dave Wilson dot com. As part of that video series, they'll walk you through the simple process of using the Dave Wilson website to find their trees either at a nearby local nursery or at a mail order source. That's Dave Wilson nursery, the nation's largest grower of fruit trees for the backyard garden. They've got planting tips, taste test results, and information about their revolutionary backyard orchard culture techniques. That'll explain how you can have a cornucopia of different fruit trees in a small backyard. Your harvest to better health begins at Dave Wilson dot com. Nothing beats the show of garden roses in the springtime. Savvy gardeners are expanding that outdoor enjoyment to the end doors by planting the best rose varieties for long lasting cut flowers. So what are those rose varieties? How do you bring in those roses to keep them long lasting? And what are the best ways to display those roses? Well, here's a hint. Combine them with other plants. Master Rosarian Debbie Arrington, the president of the Sacramento Rose Society, has that advice for us. Plus, she tells us how to get those roses to put on a dazzling display for an upcoming backyard event. Maybe a wedding or a summer barbecue or a Labor Day holiday party. Here's another hint. It's all about timing. It's all in the latest Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter and podcast entitled The Best Roses to Grow for Cut Flowers. It's available now for free. For current newsletter subscribers, look for the issue entitled The Best Roses to Grow for Cut Flowers. If you're already a subscriber, it's probably in your email waiting for you right now. Or you can start a subscription. It's free. Find the link to the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter and podcast. It's in today's show notes. Or you can find it at Substack. Then you can sign up at the newsletter link at our homepage, Garden Basics.net. Have you heard about the Waggle Dance? No, it's not an obscure Chevy Checker record from the 1960s. Nor is it the follow up to Supee Sale song Do The Mouse. The Waggle Dance is something bees do. And it's how they communicate to their hive mates, the other bees, where the good stuff is, where the pollen is, how to get there. It's a very elaborate dance. If you're like me, if you're a gardener and you spend a lot of time in the garden, sometimes you'll just sit down and watch the bees and wonder how the heck did they find these plants. What is going on in their communication? Well, we're talking to a gentleman who has studied this for a living. He and fellow scientists have an article published in the Science Journal. And it's all about the Waggle Dance and how they discovered it. We're talking with Dr. James Nye. He's the associate Dane School of Biological Sciences at University of California San Diego. He's a professor in the Department of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution. And I always like talking to university bee specialists because they seem to have a fun job. And it sounds like you had a very interesting job. I don't know how you get the bees to stand still long enough to study their dance. Well, thank you Fred. It's a pleasure to talk to you. We actually don't have them stand still. We watch them as they're in motion, but you're right. It sometimes can be a challenge to move with the bees as they're dancing. So let's talk about the whole thrust of your paper. And if people want to read about it and there's a very good explanation that you wrote for it in the March 2023 edition of Modern Farmer Magazine and website called Unlocking Secrets of the Honey Bee Dance Language. What was your impetus for studying this? One of the things we wanted to learn is why is it that some animals like human beings, songbirds, naked mole rats, why do they have to learn language? We know that other animals, many of them, are actually born with the ability to have a perfect animal communication system or animal language without the need for learning. That actually motivated us to look at honeybees because honeybees have a very sophisticated animal language and we suspected because it's so complicated that learning might be involved. We have known for a few decades that bees do communicate by movement, haven't we? Yes, that's right. In fact, it was something that Aristotle even suspected thousands of years ago. Although if you look at the translation, there's a little bit of uncertainty if you knew about the Waggle dance, but some historians of science say that he did. It truly is a Waggle dance, it is a shakier booty, but what is amazing is the amount of information that is communicated by a bee to the fellow bees about where the pollen is and how to get there. It's true. It is remarkable and it's the most complex example of animal language that communicates something like location that we know of. And also, according to your paper, the quality of a resource. That's right, when bees are repeating this figure 8 motion multiple times, the more times they repeat it, the higher the quality of the resource. And there are two motions. There's the Waggle phase. If you imagine the bee is a little arrow, she's running forward with her head pointed forward and her abdomen is waggling. So that's called the Waggle run because she's running while waggling. And then there's something called the return phase where she's returning back in a semicircle and that creates one half of the figure 8. And that return phase is faster the more excited she is about the food. So it's almost as if she's more eager to come back and do more waggles. And this isn't just happening at the hive either. I mean, anybody who's sat for a while and watched bees at work, they'll sometimes think, oh my goodness, I'm going to be stung. Look at that bee as it's going after that pollen shaking its butt at me like it's getting its stinger ready to come at me. But they're just communicating. They would normally do this only at the nest. But it's true that they can sometimes do it, especially when the nest is crowded on the outside of the nest. So if you have a standard wood box kind of on the board standing in front, but typically they're going to be doing it inside the nest. You can see a bee flying around and moving at food sources, but that's not the waggle dance. That's something very different. Oh, maybe they are going to sting me after all. It could be. Yes. Okay, let's figure out the sex of bees here that do go out foraging. Are they females or males? All the bees that are foraging or doing any work at all are females. The males only have one job and when that job is done, they die. Oh, okay. Sad life. But oh well. The waggle dance and the intricacy of their instructions are dependent upon not only being born with some of that knowledge, but also learning tips from others. That's right. The honeybees in a colony we discovered are actually learning how to dance from older and more experienced honeybees. That's great. As long as I guess there are older bees around now, you've done experiments where you have isolated the bees from the older generation. That's right. And it's very interesting. Honeybees have division of labor, meaning that they do different jobs depending on how old they are. When honeybees first emerge as adults, they start off as nurse bees. They're taking care of the larvae and also the queen. Then as they get older into their teenage days, you might say, because they don't live for years, they live for about 35, 45 days. They start taking out the trash and building the comb, doing chores around the house. And then finally, when they get older, they start to work as a guard bee and as a forager and of course as a forager, then they start to waggle dance. So the key is if you start out with a colony that's created only with dailed bees, they are all the same age and then they're going to march through this progression of jobs with each other. So they really have no opportunity to observe waggled answers because no one in the colony is of waggled dancing age. So I would imagine that group wasn't very successful. They actually were able to produce waggled answers that we could definitely recognize. But in comparison to control colonies that had the same number of bees, but they had bees of all ages and therefore they could observe and did observe other bees before they first danced, the experimental colonies were the ones that only had young bees, they could never watch older bees dance. They had three problems in the way they danced. The first is they didn't communicate the direction very well. The second is they over communicated the distance, meaning that they overshot where they were telling other bees to go. And thirdly, they had dances that didn't have the correctly formed figure eight pattern. Those bees that had those difficulties, did you reintroduce them to an older generation of bees and did their dance evolve because of that exposure to the older bees? Great question. So we came back 20 days later when they were full adults. They had now achieved 95% of their full life expectancy. In the case of bees, they don't actually perform poorer dances at this age. They're basically at their peak. And what we found is that the bees that weren't dancing very well, they were able to improve how they communicated direction and making properly formed figure eight dances. In those two aspects, they got better. But the thing about over shooting the distance, communicating distances that were too far away, that was something that they never recovered. We also did a preliminary experiment that we didn't report about in this paper. But we actually introduced another group of young bees and had them be taught in essence by these older bees that were raised in the experimental colony. What we found is that these bees that were taught had normal direction communication, also did the normal figure eight pattern, but they learned, strangely enough, the incorrect distance encoding. So it seems that communication of distance and the way it was disrupted could be passed on from one generation to the next. A very good argument for keeping the old people around a while. Exactly. They do need to learn and teach the young ones. Yes. How do they point out the direction it has to have to do something with the sun, I would imagine? Yes. I think the easiest way to think about it is what the dance probably was before it evolved. It's more complicated state. All honey bee species can produce the waggle dance. And all of them can do it on a horizontal surface, literally pointing at the direction of the resource. So I think that that's the easiest way to think about it. Imagine that the honey bee, she's a little map maker. And what she's doing with her body is she's pointing forward with her head like an arrow and she is pointing in the direction of the food source. So literally if the food source is north, she's pointed north. If it's east, she's pointed east. Now in that waggle run, she's pointing in the direction, but also the farther away the food source is, the longer the waggle run. So for example, if the food source is a mile away, she might be waggling about one second. But if it's two miles away, she might be waggling for about two seconds. So she's kind of showing in this little arrow that she's drawing the direction and how far away it is. It's amazing, but you had brought up gravity, which is a really interesting point. So what if you can no longer dance pointing directly at the food source? Honeycombs are vertically oriented. And in this case, they do a transposition. And that's a kind of fancy word, but basically if they're dancing on a vertical surface, and this is normally in the darkness of the nest, if they are dancing with their head like an arrow pointed straight up, it means fly in the direction of the sun. Now I don't mean fly into the sun, but I mean fly in the direction of the sun. So imagine the sun on the horizon and you're going to fly towards the sun on the horizon, and that will give you the right direction. Now what about if the food source is opposite the direction of the sun? If it's 180 degrees opposite the sun, then the dancer will dance with her head like an arrow pointing straight downwards when she is inside the hive. Let's say the food source is 45 degrees to the left of the sun. Then she dances 45 degrees to the left of the upright position. I would think that bees start their day when a certain temperature is reached, or do they start their work day when the sun is out. I think both factors are important. They need a certain minimum temperature in order to be able to fly, but typically they have a very strong circadian rhythm, meaning that like us, they're very influenced by the sun. And folks might appreciate now that we've just sprung forward with our clocks, that for a little while it's hard for us to wake up and get going at the right time. And the reason for that is that we have a certain biological rhythm that is responsive to the light and the same is true of honeybees. I think bees are much like me on my bicycle. I don't like to ride when it's windy. And bees, I would think if it's a windy day, they too wouldn't be waggling very much. It's true that if they face problems, they can still fly even with a somewhat significant wind. But if it's too windy, they probably wouldn't go out and forth. They just stay inside the nest. Indeed. It's harder for almond growers in California to have enough good days in a row to get their almond crop pollinated. Do native bees have the same sort of skills or is this something just reserved for honeybees? So the only bees that can communicate the location of food sources are honeybees and stingless bees. Stingless bees are only found in the tropics. They're found in the New World tropics like Brazil, Central America, and they are found in the old world tropics in Africa, Southeast Asia. But they're not found anywhere in the United States. So the only bees we have around here that can actually communicate food location are honeybees. So the purpose of native bees, I guess, is I don't know. What is the purpose of native bees? So native bees are really important because they are here as part of our native ecosystem and they've evolved along with many species of native plants. For example, if you've ever seen a barrel cactus, so these are these beautiful cacti that you find and they often have these beautiful yellow or other colored flowers, there is a cactus bee that specializes, believe it or not, on pollinating barrel cacti. Now honeybees will visit these flowers and can pollinate them. But when researchers have studied this, the native bee that's evolved, co-evolved with this cactus, is actually a much better pollinator when she visits many more seeds come out of that one visit than when a single honeybee visits. And that story is recapitulated over and over again with many different kinds of bees. You will have buffalo gourd, many other kinds of plants where although honeybees can do the job, that native species is actually better. So I'll give you an example, most folks like avocados and avocados are a big crop, especially in Southern California. The native pollinator of avocados is a stingless bee because avocados evolved in areas where there were stingless bees. Honeybees nowadays, of course, are brought in to do the job, but they are actually less efficient at it than the native bee would. But unfortunately, we don't have stingless bees in this range. So I think that illustrates some of the important parts of native bees for our native plants, but also for certain agricultural crops. And I'll just add one final thing. We think about apples and apples are wonderful. It turns out that native bees are better at pollinating apples than honeybees. I did not know that apples acquired the attention of native bees. That's very interesting. So there is a blue orchard bee that is important for pollinating apples. I think I have that right, but I do know it is a native bee. And you're right, apples were really not native to North America. They were brought over. We think about the story of Johnny Appleseed. But in fact, even though they are introduced, it's the native bee turns out to be much better at it than honeybees. And that's fascinating. And I think illustrates the importance of these very diverse native bees. Coming back to the avocado and the special bee it takes to pollinate the avocado, and I should say not a special bee, but a bee that's better at pollinating an avocado because avocados have a flowers and bee flowers. Basically they're only available for certain hours of the day. I would think that Stingles bee would have to visit that tree twice in the same day to achieve that. That's interesting. I actually haven't read the literature specifically on how it pollinates the avocado, but it's quite possible that when like a honey bee, the nectar or the pollen is being provided, that that forger will go back to that same tree or that same growth multiple times throughout a day. So even though the flowers are open at different times of day, the bee will be there and be able to collect that pollen and then subsequently pollinate the female flowers. Now one more thing about the waggle dance, and I love this part too that you point out in modern farmer, is the fact that back at the hive they have a dance floor. That's right. And the dance floor is very different for each colony. Now part of that difference is that parts of it are relatively empty or may have honey or may have pollen or may have brood, but in a natural colony, the ones that are built in trees, bees typically don't have the beautiful flat combs that they have in bee hives that humans provide, because our goal as beekeepers is to have something very uniform that's easy to remove, check and harvest honey from. Inside a natural colony, these combs are built and then they sort of merge together and grow. I think if you've looked around in the internet or actually seen a natural colony, you'll see that they make these beautiful, complicated shapes. And I think that's very interesting because it means that those shapes might be hard for a bee to waggle dance on because they're not perfectly flat. And we suspect that one of the reasons why bees may need to learn to waggle is that through practice, they can master the dance floor that is in their own colony. Without the benefit of a band too. Your research isn't over. I mean, there's a lot more to learn about the relationship between younger bees and older bees, isn't there? That's right. We'd really like to understand if this distance and coding is transmitted from one generation to the next. And moreover, if it, as we suspect, is actually adaptive. So each colony lives in a certain habitat, a local environment where food is available and where bees have to go certain distances. We think that each colony might have a dialect that is subtly adapted to those local conditions, because that would be another reason for bees to need to learn how to waggle dance. So they could learn the wisdom of their elders, the bees that have been out there know where the food is and know the best way to communicate where that food is. Just another example of the commandment, honor thy father and thy mother. Yes, exactly. Very important. Yes, indeed it is. You can read more about what Dr. James and I wrote about regarding the waggle dance, bees and pollination by visiting modernfarmer.com and reading about Dr. Nye's article that he wrote for the conversation that was reprinted by modern farmer. Or you can go back to the very source work that they published in Science Magazine, the March 2023 edition of Science about social signal learning of the waggle dance in honeybees. Why are we talking about this? Because one out of every three bites of food that you stick in your mouth comes to you courtesy of a bee. Without bees, we wouldn't have much food. You want to disagree with that? I know. I totally agree that bees, honeybees and native bees are very important for our food. Dr. James Nye is with UC San Diego. He's the associate dean of the School of Biological Sciences. He is a professor of the Department of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution. It is just a fascinating study about how bees communicate by basically shaking their booty. It's the waggle dance. Dr. Nye, thank you so much for all this good information. Thank you. It's been a pleasure and thank you for being interested in the story. From the Garden email bag, Brenda writes in and asks, in years past you've given some very specific advice about planting popcorn and ornamental corn. I would like to find that episode. I'm only planning to plant a few seeds, but they're very fancy seeds and the corn is supposed to be jewel-like. I'm doing this for the grandkids, so I'd like to have the best chance of getting it right. Well, Brenda, if it's an ornamental corn, it can be grown and popped like popcorn, although it might not be as tasty as you might want. Heavens knows there's all sorts of heirloom and hybrid popcorn varieties that pop up and taste great. Varieties you may have never heard of but are worth planting if you enjoy popcorn. It's all in the flashback episode of the week. Number 151 from back in November of 2021, it's called Harvesting Popcorn. It's got bonus information as well about growing popcorn, how to grow pumpkins, and that includes giant pumpkins. May and June are the months for planting popcorn and pumpkins, so go to your favorite podcast outlet, do a search for episode 151. We have a link for you in today's show notes, and you can also find this week's flashback podcast, Harvesting Popcorn, and all about pumpkins, as well as a transcript at our homepage, Garden Basics.net. The Garden Basics with Farmer Fred Podcast comes out once a week on Fridays, plus the newsletter podcast that comes with the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter continues and that will also be released on Fridays. Both are free and they're brought to you by SmartPods and Dave Wilson Nursery. The Garden Basics podcast is available wherever podcasts are handed out and that includes our homepage, Garden Basics.net. And that's where you can also sign up for the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter and podcast. It's Garden Basics.net, or you can use the links in today's show notes. And thank you so much for listening. Want to do the big cucumber episode here? We can do that. All right, you come back to more questions, so what do you want to do? Your show. Well, I'm following your Word document here that thank God is not on an Excel sheet, and We will do cucumber basics. All right.