Pollination Puzzle: Newsletter Challenge (April 2018)

Pollen sticks to the hairy body of the bee and is combed down to form pods on the legs...

It is not the pollen that the bees are after, but the droplets of honey each flower produces in the reproductive parts. While sucking the honey, the bees are forced to attach their feet to the flower part, during which some pollen does gets attached to the hairy legs of the bees. When the bee lands on another flower for sucking honey, the pollen grains get loosened, go to the pistil, and thus fertilise it, to make it develop into a seed. This is indeed a remarkable, natural give and take.

if we want to believe that this phenomenon, as a natural one, do so, but there seems to be some specific agency , call it God, if you will, that made it. We, as engineers, may not accept, but it is so evident.

Actually, bees do collect pollen on purpose - it is used for feeding their brood. It is true that even bees collecting nectar will also collect pollen accidentally, but the main effort is provided by pollen collectors who brush adhering pollen into baskets on their back legs. That process releases some of the pollen, some of which falls into the flowers requiring pollination.

This mechanism seems to be common knowledge. What escapes me, is what is the evolutionary advantage of bees collecting pollen BY ACCIDENT, i.e. how bees developed those hairy collectors on their feet to only make their flight harder and harder as pollen accumulates on them. The fact that more pollen means more seeds and consequently flowers the next year, is not very satisfying explanation to me.

Or is it? It could be a hand in hand evolution concerning both bees and flowers, i.e. flower might have never developed if there were no insects with hairy legs, and insects not able to collect the pollen, will eventually end up living (and dying) in a flowerless land. I don't know.

If one has a robust answer on this I will be happy to know.

Hello,

Bees do not collect pollen by accident. It is a very purposeful process.

They collect nectar (not honey) from flowers to make honey. That is their source of carbohydrate for energy.

They also intentionally collect and store pollen as a source of protein.

This pollen is mixed with honey to make "bee bread" and they use this to feed the developing brood (read this to mean "grub") until they are sealed into their cells and metamorphose into the bee.

Once the bee hatches, it only consumes honey, since it is fully formed and no longer needs protein to grow.

Beekeeping is a wonderful hobby. Most people collect the honey, but some specialise in collecting pollen to be sold as natural remedies.

I have a lot of bumblebees in my garden, and it is fascinating to watch their season. The queens overwinter alone and must forage early on to feed their first brood and themselves. These large queens use nectar as an energy source to keep them going through this solitary marathon time. The size of those early bees incidentally reflects how good a season it was last year. Better year, bigger bee.

Now it happens that I grow tomatoes, which produce lots of pollen but no nectar. The early season queens will not forage on them at all. I've seen them review the tomato row from afar and fly off, even though there might be only few other flowers available at the time. When the first brood of workers hatches, it's a different story. The garden is swarmed with these tiny bees, and they work the tomatoes for all they're worth. They definitely know if a flower has been visited or not, and waste no time on used ones.

OTOH if I bring peppers outdoors during the queens' forage, they fall on them immediately in their haste to get both nectar and pollen.

lI have the same questions. They seem to be on topic to me. I wonder why your's has been marked off topic.

I agree. This is, indeed, a miraculous activity!

I thought there was an electrical charge involved also. The pollen is attracted to the bees and moves without touching anything and is attracted to their bodies. So it is a combo of this charge as well as physically contacting the pollen as they withdraw the honey. I read "somewhere" that the bees feel this minor charge when they fly into a flower and they know the difference if a friend has already touched that flower by a reduction in the level of that charge. They move on without wasting effort. Totally amazing!

In fact every combination on earth, be it a particle of dust settling on any surface, Sodium ions combining with Chloride ions, glue bonding two surfaces strongly, you name it, there is electricity behind. It could be static electricity, sharing of electrons in an orbit, exchange, or whatever, there is electricity, the root cause. Pollen grains getting attracted to the legs or body of the bee, their transfer to the pistil of another flower, which definitely has a higher electrical attraction to such particle, is again could be ascribed to electricity.

let us accept it.

Yes, this is amazing!

By the way, you may be on the right track!

Lets not forget that plants arose before any insects or other animals on earth. Flowering plants and insects arose more or less simultaneously according to fossil records - we have no way of elaborating the exact details and timing of that process but in essence, flowering plants and insects are one branch of life fundamentally intertwined in co-evolution.

With this in mind, it is not surprising that a variety of structures, habits etc are involved in different species of insects that pollinate flowering plants, including different bees which collect pollen in different ways, on or into pockets on the legs or brush, or in the crop.

The mechanism for pollination is basically the same, regardless of the specific structures used to collect pollen as food. Electrostatic charge builds up on the bees' hairy body during flight. This causes pollen to cling to the hairs on the bee's body, and the classic method of pollen collection is to push that pollen down onto the hind legs or into pockets on the legs, using their legs. Not all of the pollen is groomed off, and there are parts of the bee's body which it cannot easily groom, thus the excess pollen is carried to the next flower and accomplishes the pollination when fresh pollen grains are brushed off in the process of foraging.

Here's a nice article about electrical ecology of the bee. Bee positive!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5599473/

Outstanding input! Very interesting to learn about something we see regularly but have not understood in any depth previously. Thanks.