Why pollination deserves your attention

Every apple, pear, plum and cherry you pick began with a pollen grain travelling from one flower to another, and in a British orchard that journey is almost always made by an insect. Get the pollinators right and everything else gets easier: more fruit set, larger fruit, better shape, and fewer misshapen "crickets" that drop before they ever ripen.

Top fruit is fussy about this. Most apples, including Cox's Orange Pippin, are self-sterile and need pollen from a different variety that flowers at the same time. A single flower may need five to seven visits from a bee before it sets properly. Bramley is triploid, so it needs two compatible pollinators nearby rather than one. Pears and plums behave in much the same way. If your trees flower beautifully each spring but crop poorly, poor pollination is one of the first things to investigate, alongside frost and feeding.

Meet the workers you already have

It pays to know who is doing the job. Honeybees get the credit, but in a cool British spring they often stay home until it warms up, and solitary bees and bumblebees do a great deal of the early work.

• Solitary bees such as the red mason bee and leafcutter bee fly at lower temperatures, often from 8–10°C, and emerge in March and April just as fruit blossom opens. They are gentle, efficient and rarely sting.
• Bumblebees are strong fliers that keep working in wind and drizzle. Queens emerge early and need nectar immediately, before anything in the orchard has opened.
• Hoverflies are often overlooked. Their larvae eat aphids, and the adults visit blossom in huge numbers later in the season.
• Moths, beetles and even some flies pollinate certain fruit and help fill the gaps on dull days.

The lesson is simple: variety is resilience. A diverse population copes far better with a cold, wet fortnight than a single colony ever could.

Plant for a long season of nectar

Pollinators need food from February to October, not just during the fortnight your trees are in flower. Aim for something open in every month, planted in generous clumps rather than as single specimens, because bees forage by sight and a drift catches the eye from metres away.

• Late winter and early spring: crocus, snowdrops, winter aconite, willow, blackthorn and hawthorn. A few dandelions in the grass are genuinely valuable — leave them.
• Late spring and early summer: comfrey, borage, phacelia, red and white clover, chives, thyme and rosemary.
• High summer: lavender, marjoram, hyssop, lemon balm, calendula and bergamot.
• Late summer and autumn: asters, Michaelmas daisy, sedum and ivy. These last two are vital for bees building up fat reserves before winter.

In the orchard itself, consider a flowering understorey. Sow a low-growing wildflower mix beneath established trees, or simply relax the mowing and let clover, selfheal and bird's-foot trefoil come through. Yellow rattle is useful for weakening vigorous grass so wildflowers can establish. A hedgerow or wildflower strip along the boundary adds shelter and another layer of forage, giving bees a route in rather than a bare field to cross.

Wild corners, nesting sites and water

Nectar is only half the story. Most of our solitary bees nest in bare ground or dead wood, and tidy orchards offer very little of either.

• Leave a south-facing patch of bare, undisturbed earth, ideally sloping so it drains. Two or three square metres is plenty.
• Keep a log pile, some standing deadwood and a bundle of hollow stems. Bramble thickets are excellent, if you can bear to leave them.
• Sink a shallow dish of water with pebbles for landing. Mason bees also need damp clay or mud within about fifty metres to seal their nesting cells.
• If you use a bee hotel, choose one with paper-lined tubes that can be cleaned or replaced each winter, mount it at chest height in a dry, sheltered spot, and never let it face driving rain.

Shelter matters too. A hedge or windbreak on the exposed side lets pollinators work the blossom even on breezy days.

Spraying: the one rule that really matters

No insecticide should be applied to a flowering tree crop, full stop. That includes the "organic" options such as pyrethrum and neem, which are broad-spectrum and lethal to bees and hoverflies. Treat first pink as a cut-off date and do not resume until petals have fallen and any flowering weeds beneath the trees have finished.

Beyond that, small habits make a big difference. Spray in the evening when bees have stopped flying; avoid drift onto hedges, margins and wildflower strips; and if you must mow flowering weeds under the trees, do it before spraying rather than after, so you are not leaving a fresh, attractive but contaminated crop of flowers. Fungicides are generally much less harmful to insects than insecticides, but evening application still reduces exposure. Where you can, lean on tolerance, predators and good airflow instead of chemicals, and let the ladybirds, hoverfly larvae and earwigs earn their keep.

Small changes, cumulative effect

You do not need to rewild the whole holding. Reduce mowing to a couple of cuts a year on the margins, allow a few dandelions and clover in the grass, plant a metre-wide drift of lavender or comfrey near the orchard edge, and put up one well-made bee hotel. Then watch your trees during blossom: on a mild afternoon you should see movement on every branch. Keep a note of what is flowering and when, and fill the gaps year by year, so something is always open for the bees that see your orchard through from first crocus to last aster.