Thanks Don, in that case I am going to put the plants I have pollinated outdoors after 2 days, and not worry about any rain affecting hip set!
By the way, when we talk about a ‘good mother’ rose, what percentage of successful crosses out of number of fertilisations are we talking about?
Hi George,
On average, I get about 10 or 11 seeds per pollination. That is a good goal when using a variety of parents (some producing many more and others fewer). As for keeper seedlings from good parents, I think about 1 in 100 is a keeper (at least for awhile). Some crosses produce a higher number of keepers, while others turn out to be a waste of time. Trial and error (and repeating previous successful crosses) and the largest number of seedlings that you can evaluate will get you the most success.
I pollinate once, don’t cover blooms and move on to the next cross.
Jim Sproul
Thanks Jim for your perspective on what is reasonable to expect rather than the extremes of what you can expect. This is what I was really asking about!
If I have time sometimes I do re-apply pollen, especially if I am unsure of pollen quality or quantity.
I sometimes get hips that split and or produce exogenous seed. I’ll take seed anyway I can get it. I worry about germination after the fact.
OK, Robert…this makes sense too, why not!
Jim, are your flowers pollinated indoors in a covered greenhouse, or in a situation where the blooms can get rained on at any time?
Here in Australia, George, we have small native bees that seem to harvest loads and loads of pollen. I’ve shown Jim photos of these little guys on a rose bloom before. In the past I pollinated a rugosa flower with loads of pollen, left it uncovered for about 20 minutes, came back and found three or four of these little bees crawling over it and in 20 minutes they had scraped every last bit of pollen (that I could see) off the flower. So now I put a small drawstring bag made of organsa over the flower for about 4-5 days just to keep the native bees off. I like these little drawstring bags (that I got really cheaply from a $2 shop down here), because whilst essentially a mesh, they help to intercept any rain I get and so reduce the chances of pollen getting washed off. Stigma are pretty sticky anyway, so some pollen is bound to stay put but I’ve found these little bags improve the odds substantially. If I pollinated in a greenhouse I wouldn’t bother with any covers at all… just pollinate and tag it…
Hi Simon.
What a pain!! So much for the notion floating around that flowers without petals don’t attract bees!!
I have also seen small crawly wingless insects go right onto the newly pollinated stigmas, as well.
Maybe the smell of the pollen in some cases attracts such tiny critters to the stigmas.
Normal honey bees don’t seem to be so attracted. These little ones are no more than 10mm long and seem to be attracted to the pollen and seem to show a preference for rose flowers,especially the rugosa flowers for some reason… it’s not uncommon to find 5-6 of the little fellas hard at work on every flower, and other flowers with very long exposed stamens with heavy pollen loads (like our Syzygium too).
This is the little native bee we have here on a flower of the miniature rose; ‘Suntan’. The flower is only about 4-5cm across for scale. When I lived near Newcastle we also encountered the same bee, so it is quite widespread… not sure how common they’d be on the North Shore of Sydney though 
Pretty rose. We have them here in Tennessee also. I’ve always called them sweat bees. They do a fine job of pollination but require a hybridizer to get out in the garden early to get the flowers before the bees do. I also have bumblebees that hang out in the rugosa flowers all day apparently intoxicated from the fragrance.
Simon, when you say these bees removed pollen off the newly-pollinated rugosa flower, did the pollinated flower still have the petals on it or were all the petals removed?
Pretty picture by the way