The Case of the Vanishing Honeybees: A Scientific Mystery
If Honeybees Are in Trouble We're in Trouble Having insects such as honeybees vanish may not seem like a big deal but it is Without honeybees you could be limited to eating oats rice and corn These foods come from plants that use wind to move their pollen male reproductive cells to their ovules female reproductive cells The process of transferring pollen is called pollination It has to happen for a plant to produce seeds parts that contain an embryo or baby plant That's how the plant produces more of its own kind of plant The wind pollinates some plants But birds bats and insects especially bees pollinate many more Honeybees in particular are needed in order to grow apples raspberries watermelon almonds and cucumbers to name just a few These are some of the foods you can enjoy thanks to
Honeybees depend on plants just as plants depend on bees Many plants produce nectar a sweet liquid to attract bees and other pollinators Bees gather this liquid as food The nectar's scent attracts bees to a plant Many flowers are also colored to signal that they contain nectar The flowers are shaped to make sure that visiting honeybees will spread pollen in return for the food To reach nectar a worker bee usually has to burrow into a flower The bee brushes past the flower's male parts where it collects pollen and the female parts containing the plant's ovules The bee picks up pollen this way and also drops off a little pollen often from another flower To form a seed the ovules and the pollen must be from the same kind of plant Fortunately honeybees tend to visit only one kind of plant during a nectar collecting flight And each flower produces just a few drops of nectar a day So during each flight a bee visits as many as four hundred flowers That's a lot of pollination
Back at the hive the worker passes the nectar it collected to another bee That bee uses its strawlike mouthpart to pump the nectar into a cell in the hive's wax comb wall of wax cells The nectar mixes with the bee s digestive juices Then lots of worker bees join in fanning their wings This increases airflow over the nectar mixture in the cells Nectar straight from the flower is as much as 80 percent water Airflow causes some of the water to evaporate move into the air But doing this just once isn't enough Another bee sucks up the liquid and repeats the process Little by little the nectar becomes a sugar rich thick liquid honey Bees eat honey for energy to fly and stay active Any extra is stored in the hive's cells and capped with wax The bees will eat this honey later when plants aren't flowering and producing nectar
Bees get more food from a plant than just the nectar They use the plant's pollen too While bees are sucking up nectar pollen sticks to them They regularly comb pollen off their bodies and pack it into basketlike parts on their hind legs Some pollen brushes off on other flowers There's always some left over though when the bees return to the hive Each returning bee backs into one of the empty wax cells on the comb and flicks off the pollen Other workers chew the pollen mixing it with a little honey That turns the pollen into beebread a high protein food bees need to stay strong and healthy As you can see the partnership between bees and plants is important to life for both Without plants producing nectar and pollen bees wouldn't have food And without bees visiting the flowers to collect nectar many plants wouldn't be able to reproduce This partnership benefits another group too people
