If you drive by cranberry marshes right now, you might spot stacks of honey bee hives near the cranberry beds. Bringing in honey bees and bumble bees help pollinate cranberry blossoms. Although this cranberry vine may have to rely on wild bees in the area as this vine is not in a managed cranberry bed but a wild cranberry native to the marshlands of central Wisconsin.
Wild Cranberry Blossoms
Yesterday was the Cranberry Blossom Day in Warrens, Wisconsin, an area where Wisconsin’s No.1 fruit crop in grown. Cranberries have had a variety of different names since their discovery. Algonquins of Wisconsin dubbed the fruit “atoqua” but the name that stuck is the shortened version of crane berry, named by early German and Dutch settlers, because the flower’s resemblance to the head and bill of a crane.
Cranberry Blossoms
On cold or rainy days, the honey bees are not too active and when they are, they often bypass these small cranberry blossoms, about an quarter of an inch long, in favor of large white water-lily blossoms, 3 to 6 inches, in the nearby ponds. Europeans named the fruit “crane berry” because they thought the cranberry blossom looked like the head of a sandhill crane.
Tiny Cranberry Blossom
Today is the Cranberry Blossom Day in Warrens and last weekend was the Cranberry Blossom Festival in Wisconsin Rapids so it gives you a hint that the cranberry vines are blooming in Wisconsin this time of the year.
Cranberry flowers are not capable of self fertilization so pollinators, like bees, are required to move pollen from one flower to another. Cranberry blossom do not offer the same nectar appeal that other crops offer so the bees might fly off and find other flowers to pollinate, such as area weeds or lily pads, but hopefully the bees will pollinate the blossoms in the shape of a crane head so I have my cranberry juice and other cranberry treats.
Cranberry Blossom
