I haven’t got much room for trees at my house, but I wanted one fruit tree, and I love pears. So in 2021 I ordered a pear tree through the Washtenaw County Conservation Department’s plant sale. I biked it home from the Farm Council Grounds in Saline on a beautiful day spring day.

That tree has thrived since then and is now almost even with our second-story windows. Last year it had many flowers, only one of which became a pear. We watched that lonely pear until it fell and was gnawed on by an animal.
I knew that this pear tree (Blake’s Pride) was not self-fertile. But it can cross with any other pear, including the Bradford Pear, aka Callery Pear, a loathsome invasive cultivar that looks pretty, smells awful, and breaks easily. You may already know and dislike it. I just searched up “Bradford Pear” and see Missouri is set to ban it from being sold – good stuff.
Ann Arbor has many of these misbegotten trees. One grows half a block away from me and I was hoping that would be close enough to do the trick. But our yield of one pear showed it was not.
What to do? I considered trying to hand-pollinate between the Bradford Pear and my pear. Their periods of flowering overlap. But that would be tedious and I can’t reach the top half of the tree.
Then an idea came to me: I would clip a bough from the Bradford Pear and hang it in my tree. Insects would alternate between the two kinds of flowers and not know the difference.
It was free and took five minutes. And it worked! I have dozens of tiny pears set on my tree:

The clipped branch’s flowers wilted after a few days, but it had been long enough for the bees to do their business.
I have a bee hotel in my driveway maybe forty feet from the tree. I credit those little solitary bees with doing the work here. They didn’t have to repay me for hosting them but it’s sweet that they did.
Bee hotels are neat. Here’s a picture I took in 2020 during COVID lockdown of a large bee hotel at the Michigan State University Children’s Garden:

Mine is only the size of one of those rectangular blocks on the top shelves of this hotel.
We’ll see how the harvest turns out, but I’ve solved the pollination problem!