A Bee Named Lola

Lola bee has been adopted at the farm. Lola is a charming, vivacious bee with a great sense of style and fashion.

Needhams' Nick Farm Patch

A farm patch in the center island of Cape Abilities Farm on Route 6A in Dennis has been adopted and named Needhams' Nick. The patch is planted with Larkspur and is located near the new greenhouse on the farm.

Grampa Iadarola Tomato Plant

A tomato plant in the new Cape Abilities Farm greenhouse was just adopted to honor Grampa Iadarola. The plant is very hearty and strong and it is expected that there will be many, many tomatoes harvested from this wonderful plant.

Peter the Bee, not the Rabbit

Peter the bee hopped into Cape Abilities Farm over the weekend. Like his namesake, Peter Rabbit, he occasionally gets into a bit of trouble, but it always seems to work out in the end.

June the Bee

June bugs are well known across Cape Cod, but there is now a June bee as well. June the bee was actually adopted in May, but she is looking forward to enjoying the warm weather in the month named in her honor.

Helena Bee

Helena the bee arrived at Cape Abilities Farm over the weekend. As a bumblebee, Helena spends most of her day pollinating tomato flowers and buzzing about.

Buzzy Bee II

The second bee was adopted and named Buzzy - a popular name at Cape Abilities Farm. This Buzzy is very happy in the mid-Cape area and is very fond of tomatoes.

Michael, the bee

Michael, the bee was recently adopted at Cape Abilities Farm. Michael is a hard working, reliable bee who has made a name for himself among the other bees in a very short time.

Bumblebees Don't Like Watches

In addition to tomatoes, bumblebees are also used to pollinate other crops. Growers use them to pollinate cucumbers. peppers, eggplants, melons, strawberries, blueberries and squash.

 

The bumblebees at Cape Abilities Farm will help us grow more than 30,000 pounds of tomatoes this summer.

 

The people working at Cape Abilities Farm and the bumblebees work well together. The bees have stingers, but they’re generally not aggressive or troubled by the presence of their human co-workers. However, bumblebees do have a few things they dislike. The color blue, for some reason. They also don’t like strong smells like perfumes or aftershave and metal bracelets, rings and watches. Go figure.

 

Bumblebees: Efficient and Environmentally Friendly

Bumblebees can save hydroponic farmers money. Until 20 years ago, the standard pollination process involved having workers manually stimulate the tomato flowers as often as three times a week to distribute the pollen. Switching to bumblebees increased the number and size of tomatoes and cut costs by about 75 percent.

In addition to being efficient, the bumblebees are also environmentally friendly. They are good early indicators of a problem in the greenhouse environment or plant health. If bumblebees cease pollinating, it indicates that something in the greenhouse has made the pollen unpalatable to the bees. This is a good early warning signal. Also, because of their sensitivity, growers like Cape Abilities Farm follow an integrated pest management approach with less reliance on hard chemicals and more use of biological control agents.

Each bumblbee that you adopt helps support the farm and create jobs for people with disabilities on Cape Cod.