OMFG, BEES! by Matt Kracht

Author:Matt Kracht
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC

You’re Pollen My Leg

It looks like colorful powder, but pollen is really the microspores of a seed plant and, if you’re a bee, it’s gonna get stuck all over your fuzzy little body. There’s no avoiding it. As a bee travels from flower to flower, pollen gets carried from the male structures of one plant to the female structures of another, where plant fertilization occurs, and boom! That’s pollination.

A bee might visit between 50 and 1,000 plants per day to gather pollen, depending on how much pollen those plants have available. An average colony of honeybees needs to collect about 100 pounds [45.4 kg] of pollen per season because it is a critical part of a bee’s diet. Pollen provides a key source of protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals, as well as other nutrients. This is why they’re always messing around in those flowers.

But how exactly do they collect that pollen and transport it back to the colony? You might be thinking, “Oh, I know the answer to this one,” but don’t get cocky, because you probably don’t know the whole story and the other half is going to blow your mind.

As a bee flies through the air, the extreme rapid flapping of her wings builds up a positive static electric charge. “No way!” you think, but yes way, electrically charged bees are flying around everywhere all the time.

The pollen grains of a flower hold a negative charge, and when a bee lands in a flower, that fine pollen gets shaken loose from the flower’s anther. It is attracted to the positively charged hairs on the bee’s body, so it just leaps onto the bee without her even having to touch it.

By the way, there is a study showing some evidence that bees can actually sense the electric field of flowers with their hairs and, if a flower has lost too much of its negative charge, they know it has been depleted of pollen by other bees, and will avoid wasting effort and move on to a flower with a better energy field.

Mind blown? You’re welcome.

After collecting all that pollen to her like a superhero with magnetic abilities, the bee uses her legs to wipe the pollen from her body either onto her abdomen or, depending on the species of bee, her hind legs. Admittedly, this is a much less impressive way to move pollen around, but who am I to criticize?

Once back in the nest, the forager cleans herself off and unloads her pollen haul into waiting pollen storage cells near the brood nest. It will be used to feed the young. And also those lazy-ass drones, at least until they’re no longer needed for breeding.

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