In praise of bees: the Cupid of the flowering world
Honeybees turn nectar into honey. Plenty of other insects drink the sweet energy drink produced by flowers to fuel their flight, but no other stockpiles a concentrated version of it. We’ve prized this natural sweetener for thousands of years for its culinary and medicinal qualities.
They live in large colonies consisting of foraging workers, male drones and an egg-laying queen, which are component parts of a system that operate together as part of a whole in what entomologists call a superorganism.
Honeybees and bumblebees account for only 1% of the estimated 25,000 bee species worldwide. Most neither make honey, nor live in colonies, nor do they sting. The vast majority are small brown solitary bees, nesting alone – often next door to each other – in nooks and crannies or burrowing underground. These bees are wild.
What all bees share is that they play cupid to their favourite flowers. This is what makes bees wonderful: they are flowering plants’ romantic go-betweens. Bees and flowering plants have coevolved over 100mn years, since bees broke away from wasps to become vegan, swapping meat protein for pollen. As well as being the only source of protein that bees collect to feed their young, pollen grains contain a plant’s sperm cells and they require an agent to transport them from the male part of the flower, the stamen, to the female stigma in order for the ovaries to produce seeds.
A bee is perfectly designed for this. The hairs on its body and legs carry a positive electrical charge that attracts the negative-charged pollen grains, so as it forages for pollen and nectar it inadvertently brushes some pollen from one flower head to another. Some wild bees use a special technique called “buzz pollination” to shake the pollen from the plant.
So successful is the relationship that an estimated one in three mouthfuls we eat come from flowering plants pollinated by bees – most fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices, seeds and nuts, and coffee.
Bees’ are a linchpin in the natural world, their pollination services producing seeds and berries for birds and small mammals that form an important part of nature’s food chain.
Oligolectic bees have adapted to feed mainly on one type of flower, timing their short life cycle for when the plant blooms, as with the autumn-flying ivy bee. Others are more generalists. But wherever there are flowering plants, from windswept mountaintops to humid jungles and arid deserts and even near the north pole – home to the Arctic bumblebee (Bombus polaris) – there will be bees to pollinate them. The kaleidoscope of colours and myriad perfumes are all designed to attract their master pollinator. So it is bees we have to thank for the beauty and scent of the flowering world.