Free
Imagine yourself on a sunny day in a meadow. You’re surrounded by sunflowers, wildflowers, and dandelions.
The air is fragrant with the smell of ripe blossoms and noisy with the buzzing of bees. Thousands of them are hard at work all over the place. They’re gathering nectar and pollen for the hive and also spreading pollen from plant to plant.
The color and scent of flowers attract bees and other insects. Pollen is the powdery yellowish substance inside flower blossoms. It contains male reproductive cells. When a bee lands on a flower, pollen sticks to the hairs on its body. When it flies to the next flower, the pollen sticks to that flower’s female cells. This joining of male and female cells is called fertilization. Without fertilization, new plants or flowers could not grow.
Meanwhile, the nectar a bee sucks up with its tongue is used for making honey. A bee delivers that nectar to the hive. Then it flies right back out again to get more. Honeybees visit between 60,000 and 90,000 flowers to collect enough nectar to make just a thimbleful of honey. There’s a reason people say “busy as a bee”!
Shall We Dance?
Honeybees use specific “dances” to direct other bees to the best sources of food. These are the two most common dances. ▼
The Round Dance
◀ The bee circles first in one direction, then the other. The exact location of the nectar is not made clear. The round dance just shows that the nectar is close by—100 yards away or less.
The Wagging Dance
▲ When the food source is farther away, the bee’s dance becomes a kind of map. It dances a half circle in one direction and turns. Then it moves in a straight line while wagging its body. After that, the bee dances a half circle in the other direction, more or less doing a figure eight. The wagging dance shows both the distance and the location of the food source. The direction the bee moves while wagging is the direction where the food is, relative to the Sun.
◀ With their compound eyes, bees have ultraviolet vision. This lets them see patches, or guides, on flowers. These guides indicate when there’s a lot of nectar inside the flower.
▲ Bees cannot see the color red, but birds can. So it’s birds, not bees, that pollinate red flowers.
▲ Bees pollinate more crops than any other insect does. Here is just some of the food you’d have to give up eating if not for bees.
