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Interviews with news makers and discussion of topics important to Southwest Michigan. Subscribe to the podcast through Apple itunes and Google. Segments of interview are heard in WestSouthwest Brief during Morning Edition and All Things Considered

WSW: How This Year's Fruit Crops Look

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Fruit season looks promising this year in Michigan. Blueberries could break last year’s record for fifth-largest crop, and cherries might even be overabundant. Local strawberries should be hitting southwest Michigan markets soon.

That’s according to Mark Longstroth, an educator with the Michigan State University Extension Service. Based in Paw Paw, Longstroth tracks crops such as apples and berries in Southwest Michigan and around the state.

WMUK recently spoke with Longstroth about this season’s prospects, what happens when the supply of fruit outstrips demand and the health of the region’s honeybees.

What’s happening now

“We have finished the bloom of the tree fruits, the cherries and apples and peaches down here in the southwest but they’re still in bloom up around Traverse City. And if we get nice warm sunny days, the bees really like that and they come out and work the blossoms real hard so we get good fruit set.

“If we get cold, wet, windy days, the bees don’t like that and they stay in the hive. The flowers have to be pollinated within a day or two of when they open, generally to set fruit.

“But here in Southwest Michigan it looks like we’re going to have a pretty good apple crop, we’ll have more peaches than we had last year, we’ll still have plenty of blueberries.

“We produced the fifth-largest crop that we had ever produced last year and I thought that we had significant injuries so I expect that we’ll do quite well with blueberries. And cherries, they’re worried about having too many cherries now so it’s a nice worry to have.”

What to do when the trees make more cherries that people plan to buy

“Fruit responds to the law of supply and demand. So if you have more cherries than they want, the price will go down. If you don’t have enough cherries for what they want, then the price will go up and people will look for cherries.

“In cherries we have a marketing order, a federal marketing order and they will look and see that the market for cherries is going to be – maybe 500 million – and then try to estimate the crop and they have what they call a diversion, where a grower can say, ‘Okay, I’m not going to harvest these cherries,’ and he’ll get a diversion certificate.

“And let’s say for the sake of argument that they decide that they’re not going to harvest 10 percent of the crop here in Michigan. And so that means that all the growers would normally not harvest 10 percent of their crop. But there’ll be growers that want to harvest 100 percent of their crop and there will be other growers that will be quite happy to harvest nothing get diversion certificates and then sell those,” he says.

How you can tell that honeybees are doing well

“We’ve had really strong hives in general. In the last two weeks I’ve had three calls from people who have swarms of bees that have settled down in their yard and they’re trying to find someone to get rid of them.

Longstroth-web-full.mp3
WMUK's full May 2015 interview with Mark Longstroth

“And generally those swarms are coming from a commercial hive that was really strong and thought ‘things are really great, we’re here in the middle of a big apple orchard that’s in full bloom, we’ve got lots of bees, we’ve got lots of food, let’s make another hive.’

“And they’ll fly off and look for place and the beekeeper’s quite excited about that because he wants to keep that hive. So you try to figure out who’s got the closest orchard and call them and find out who their beekeeper is and then call the beekeeper and tell them that there’s a swarm at such and such a place.

“And they’ll show up with a hive, and the swarm is sending out scouts to find another hive, and they find this really nice hive sitting next to them. So they’ll move into it and the beekeeper has another hive. So the fact that they’re splitting means that the hives that come in here are fairly strong.”

Longstroth says he hasn’t seen many instances of Colony Collapse Disorder, where a hive’s worker bees vanish en masse, in Southwest Michigan. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t afflicted some hives, he says. But he adds that the Extension’s focus has been on teaching good pesticide use around bees.

That largely amounts to not spraying anything insecticidal – even products labeled "bee safe,"– in an orchard while honeybees out looking for food, he says.
 

Sehvilla Mann joined WMUK’s news team in 2014 as a reporter on the local government and education beats. She covered those topics and more in eight years of reporting for the Station, before becoming news director in 2022.
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