We set out to write this story to answer a perhaps trivial, but nonetheless persistent question: What’s the deal with those nets covering a tree, a row, sometimes a whole orchard of orange or citrus trees around town?
You see them as you drive past, blanketing rows of citrus greenery in gauzy white mesh, like when the camera turns to Margot Kidder in the Superman movies (have you seen those? The soft focus was deranged). We’re so often surrounded by this kind of quirky pastoral beauty in the Central Valley, yet because so little of it is public land, a lot of us never learn much about it.
Luckily, sometimes all it takes is knowing the right person to ask (along with some trial and error).
“Those nets are used to prevent bees from pollinating our citrus trees,” says Monique Mueller, comms director for Bee Sweet Citrus, a citrus growing, packing, and shipping operation headquartered in Fowler. “Bee activity can lead to seed development when they transfer pollen between flowers – resulting in seeded fruit.”
Unlike a lot of local tree fruits and nuts, as well as berries, which need bees and other pollinators to produce fruit, or to produce fruit at scale, most citrus varieties are self-pollinating and don’t require bees. And within that category, it’s only the clementines and W. Murcott varieties (both types of easy-to-peel mandarins) that require netting in order not to produce seeds, notes Joe Berberian, also from Be Sweet.
This video, from Fresh Bites Daily, shows a bit of the netting process being carried out, on a grove of Halos (a mandarin brand from the Wonderful Company).
“They keep the netting in large spools at the end of each row and roll it across when the fruit is in blossom. The netting is weighted at the bottom by soil from the row. Walking up close to them, you could see bees buzzing around inside the netting. It’s pretty cool,” writes the videographer, Amanda Rose.
Be Sweet didn’t provide details on the cost of their netting operation, but it seems safe to assume that whatever it costs to cover rows of clementines in nets every year is less than the wholesale price difference between seeded and seedless mandarin varieties.
As Clovis grower James McFarlane told ABC30 back in 2014, “Soccer moms don’t like to buy mandarins with seeds in them.”
At the time, McFarlane estimated a 50% difference in price for his 40 acres of mandarins. “It’s an enormous pain, I can’t stress that enough,” he said.
Some of us older heads might remember a Seinfeld cold opening from 1993, in which Jerry lampoons the scientists who spent years developing the seedless watermelon, rather than working on “more important” things, like developing vaccines and curing disease. “Sure, thousands are dying needlessly, but this – ptoo! – that’s gotta stop!”
Good bit, but consumers in the years since have collectively only spoken louder and more stridently: They hate spitting seeds, and will pay a premium not to. (Not to mention being able to feed them to small children without deseeding or worrying about choking).
I happen to have a minneola tangelo tree in my backyard – a great tasting, easy-to-peel citrus fruit that also unfortunately has lots of seeds. I asked Berberian whether, if I were to net my relatively small, single backyard tree, the fruit would come out seedless.
“I don’t think so, but it would be a good experiment,” writes Berberian.
It turns out, there is a paper on just that. Larry K. Jackson and Stephen H. Futch, writing for the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida in 2024, note that netting a minneola tangelo is likely to produce seedless fruit. Unfortunately that comes with a big trade off, of not getting much of it. “Minneola is not strongly self-fruitful and low yields will be experienced if suitable pollenizers are not supplied in close proximity and numbers,” they wrote.
Which is to say, it’s all a complicated dance that balances a number of different factors we probably aren’t thinking about when driving past. And that also helps explain why it takes those scientists Seinfeld mentions so many years to breed a successful crop.
The upside of our inquiry was proving the truism that sometimes asking stupid questions does produce fruitful answers. Happy eating.
Do you have a stupid food question? Drop us a line, and we’ll see if we can grope our way to an intelligent answer.
