bees pollinate a third of everything we eat and play a vital role in sustaining the planet’s ecosystems. Some 84% of the crops grown for human consumption – around 400 different types of plants – need bees and other insects to pollinate them to increase their yields and quality. These include most fruits and vegetables, many nuts, and plants such as rapeseed and sunflowers that are turned into oil, as well as cocoa beans, coffee and tea. Crops grown as fodder for dairy cows and other livestock are also pollinated by bees. And it’s not only food crops that rely on bee pollination, cotton does as well. As a result,annual global crop pollination by bees is estimated to be worth $170bn. But beyond their monetary value for maintaining our fragile food supply, bees also make an invaluable contribution to ecosystems around the world. Seeds, fruits and berries eaten by birds and small mammals are all from plants that are pollinated by bees, making them guardians of the food chain and the biodiversity of our species. Bees are industrious pollinators because they have co-evolved with flowering plants over millions of years. The bees need the flowers for food, while the flower needs the bee to reproduce. Unlike other insects, nectar and pollen from flowering plants are bees’ only food source; the sweet nectar drink gives adult bees energy. Pollen is protein-rich baby food. As the poet Kahlil Gibran beautifully put it: “To the bee, a flower is the fountain of life, and to the flower, the bee is a messenger of love.” In the process of foraging for food, bees are designed to pollinate. If you watch a female honeybee or bumblebee on a flower, you will see she has balls of pollen on her back legs. These are collected in her pollen baskets which she takes back to the nest to feed the young after fertilising the flowers. For solitary bees, the pollen collects on the hairs on their abdomen. So how do the bees pollinate? Quite simply, the bee gets covered in pollen, from the male part of the flower (the stamen), and deposit the grains on the female part (the stigma) of the next flower that they visit. Luckily for the plant, bees tend to visit flowers from the same plant when they are flowering rather than flit from one plant to another, so the plant is able to have sex. Once the pollen is on the stigma it moves down into the ovary where it fertilises and forms a seed. A few months later the seed grows into a fruit or vegetable. Think of an apple tree; it blossoms, is visited by bees, produces apples later in the summer containing pips (the seeds), which if planted could slowly grow into a new apple tree.
