Kitchen Garden Forum

Our broad beans (Witkiem Manita) are flowering in the garden and I am worried about the lack of insects to pollinate them at the moment (the bulk of our broad beans are grown on the allotment and won't be flowering for a while yet when it's, hopefully, warmer). Do you think it's feasible to hand pollinate the flowers with, say, a small artist's brush?

Hi Monika
It is certainly possible, but would be highly labour intensive so only bother if you have plenty of spare time on your hands.

I have never known anyone to have to hand pollinate broad beans before so I would leave it to nature.

Compo

I think that you would find it almost impossible, Monika. Beans don't have open type flowers but pea type ones where the visiting insect grabs onto the lower petal and its weight opens the flower so that it can get its tongue in to find the nectar. Hand pollinating would be seriously hard work.
I don't think that you have a problem as beans carry on producing more and more flowers up their step until enough have been pollinated and fertilized. When the plant has set enough flowers for its size it then seems to divert most of its energy into pod and seed production.
I have the opposite problem to you. We have a bumble bee nest in an outbuilding and in the broad bean rows there is a tremendous amount of activity all day long! DW was a bit worried about the nest but the bees seem very docile so we've left them alone to do their thing.

John

Thank you everybody. I did have a good look at the individual flowers and realised that I would have to push a small brush right into the flower to open the "lips". We do have bumble bees about but I haven't seen any on the broad beans and, overall, there appears to be distinct lack of insects. Maybe I should try to hand pollinate half of the 30 plants and leave the rest to nature? Might be quite interesting to see if there is a difference in the set!