Flowers per raceme, week 1
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). 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, ...