Hello everyone! Today is hot, I'm tired, I'm sitting without doing nothing so I think I'll open some stupid thread

I have a question: I never found a bee pod on daylilies except for stella de oro. I have quite some blooms open, but no one gets pollinated. Little show stopper has something like 15 blooms open but it seems it never gets pollinated. And so happens with all the others plants. Is there a reason? Just fate?

I can't really answer your question, because the bees do a better job than I do at pollinating in my garden. I saved several bee pods last year, and I germinated them successfully this spring. I did some crosses and had pods form with nice plump black seeds, but they didn't germinate! The bee pod seeds germinated and mine didn't! Figure that out

So maybe bees know what to do, and what plant will born bold and beautiful!

Sabrina, I find that only small flowered varieties (like Stella) get bee pods in my yard. The larger flowers tend to have really long pistils so the bee is much less likely to brush against it as it goes from flower to flower collecting pollen. That's actually good if you want to hybridize but don't want to get up at the crack of dawn!

I get a lot of bee pods, I was just noticing the bees working the soil, I think they get their moisture from it. My neighbor just started keeping bees this year, so I expect a bounty of a crop as far as bee pods go this year, I was just noticing a few bee pods out in the garden this morning.

Edited because it double posted.

Elena, I never thought about the pistil being too long! It's a logical explanation! We have a neighbour that keeps bees so I see a lot of them. Some tried to nest in the pots with vermiculite the past september.

Some bees do nest underground so be careful.

For some of the original daylily species, bees were/are the primary pollinators. For some, nocturnal moths were/are the primary pollinators and for others butterflies were/are the primary pollinators.

In the original species there typically are a number of different characteristics that have been selected/evolved to fit the natural pollinator. These are called the pollination syndrome. So a plant may open its flowers at night and have a strong scent to attract night-flying moths. Another plant may open its flowers during the day and have special colours to attract butterflies. When these two species are crossed for several generations the characteristics become mixed. For example, some of the offspring might open their flowers at night but do not have strong scent. Others might open during the day but not have the correct flower colours. The seedlings do not have appropriate pollination syndromes for successfully attracting their pollinators.

The small flowered cultivars such as Stella presumably still have enough characteristics (pollen for bees for example) and their flowers are small enough that bees can successfully pollinate them.

Larger cultivars may have lost their scents or not have strong enough scents or may open at the wrong time of the day or have the wrong flower colours, etc. fo attract their pollinators.

If you grow daylily cultivars that are not many generations removed from the species then you will find that they are more likely to be naturally pollinated than modern tetraploid cultivars, for example, Tetrina's Daughter has its flowers naturally pollinated by night-flying moths here. Ophir has a few of its flowers pollinated by night-flying moths also.