Pollination by hand in China

Photo Credit: Eric Tourneret

In China, in the world's pear capital, it is the farmers who carry out the pollination of the trees: costly and painstaking work that replaces the bees killed by pesticides, Neonicotinoids specifically.

The city of Hanyuan, dressed in the finery of the white blossoms on the pear trees, could make us believe in the eternal China with its red and black brick roofs and the grandeur of its foggy landscapes. But don't let yourself be misled. It was agricultural reform instituted by the "Great Helmsman" that made the city the pear capital of Sichuan at the beginning of the 1980s. Perched at 1600 metres altitude, Hanyuan transformed its rice paddies into orchards. At the time, pears sold for 4 to 5 times the price of rice because China had to feed its population, which had tripled in ten years, going from 400 million to 1.2 billion. Today, with 7% of the world's cultivated land, the country has to feed 22% of the world's population.




The blossoming period of the pear trees is a crucial season, the one for pollination. Pear trees are auto-incompatible, which means that the trees need a hybrid pollination to produce fruit in good quantity and of a good size. Natural pollinators like bees have disappeared from the valley, killed or chased away by the pesticides that the farmers use on their crops. So, Chinese agricultural engineers replaced the insects with people and hand-pollination has spread in the valley and throughout the province of Sichuan.
In the Cheng Su family's orchard, they have been busy for several days now. The couple, for whom half their yearly income comes from the sale of five tons of pears, are pollinating one by one the flowers on their trees at a rate of thirty or so trees per day. The husband climbs the trees while his wife takes care of the lower branches, for 5 to 6 hours a day during the hottest hours of the day. This year, the season started late, the snow and cold lasting until early March. The first blossoms opened quickly, just after the thaw. Just as quickly, the family gathered the flowers from the early blooming pear trees in the house's courtyard to obtain the pollen necessary for the pollination. Once gathered, the pollen is dried under a heating cover. The prepared pollen is in fact a mix of pollen, pistils and stamens and its colour is brown, rarely yellow.

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Eric Tourneret has traveled the world, training his accomplished eye on images from interiors to honey bees. His skill has long been on view in French magazines, such as Figaro Magazine, Paris Match, VSD, Terre Sauvage, GEO, Point de vue, Femme actuelle, that have sent him in pursuit of visual stories.

His startlingly original images, the products of a unique aesthetic honed by technical expertise, tell compelling tales that can now be found in two books. Tourneret loves to work in the wild, and 25 years of venturing through the outbacks of most continents have brought him an immediate sense of the preciousness of the environment. Home in France, he discovered the failure of a prime link between nature and man, the honey bee. He turned to photographing the bees and their keepers intimately and passionately - a subject that has absorbed him for over eight years. Excruciatingly patient labor (one shot took a week and 4,500 shutter releases) produced the exquisite photo book Le peuple des abeilles (The People of the Bees, Rustica, 2007).

His book Cueilleurs de miel (The Honey Gatherers, Rustica, 2009), widens the theme to man's global relationship with the bee - primitive honey hunting tradition in Nepal, industrial pollination in the U.S., and urban beekeeping on the roof of the Paris opera. While large format photos from the books continue to be exhibited throughout France, Tourneret has turned his fascination to television documentary as well as film.

The photographer who showed us bees gathered at a pond like wild animals around an African water hole, who showed us pollen-laden returning foragers from inside the hive, who showed us bees pummeling a honey hunter suspended over a cliff on ropes - that photographer is preparing to widen our eyes yet again.

# Mea Mac Neil American Bee journal