Pollination: How Bees Power Our Ecosystems

Подробнее о видео

#pollination #bees #reproduction #ngscience @NGScience

If you’ve ever visited a garden or natural area with a diversity of flowers, the chances are, you’ve also spotted bees. Buzzing busily from bloom to bloom, these small insects play a vital role in the health of ecosystems—and much of it comes down to their constant search for nectar and pollen.

Bees collect nectar, a sweet liquid made by flowers, as their main source of energy. It’s rich in sugars and fuels their flight and daily activity. But nectar has another purpose too: back in the hive, bees use it to make honey. Honey bees, in particular, store nectar in a special part of their body called the honey stomach and transport it home, where it’s passed from bee to bee and gradually thickened into honey. This honey becomes the hive’s long-term food supply, especially during cold or dry seasons. Nectar is also used to help feed developing larvae—often mixed with pollen to form a nutritious paste called bee bread.

Pollen is the powdery substance you’ll often see clinging to a bee’s legs. It contains the male reproductive cells of flowers, but for bees, it’s an essential source of protein and nutrients. It’s especially important for feeding baby bees. Honey bees have specialized structures on their hind legs called pollen baskets, or corbiculae, where they pack the pollen into neat, visible clumps as they travel between flowers.

Without nectar, bees couldn’t fly, store honey, or feed their young. Without pollen, the next generation wouldn’t grow. And as bees move from one flower to another in search of these vital resources, they unknowingly set off a chain reaction—helping plants reproduce and ecosystems flourish.

It all comes down to a remarkable partnership between bees and flowering plants—a process known as pollination.

Here’s how it works: when a bee lands on a flower to collect nectar or pollen, tiny grains of pollen stick to the fine hairs on its body. As the bee moves on to the next flower—often of the same species—some of that pollen is transferred onto the female part of the flower, called the stigma. This pollen then travels down into the flower, where it fertilizes the ovules. Once fertilized, the flower can begin developing seeds. In many plants, these seeds form inside a fruit, which helps protect them and often aids in their dispersal—whether by wind, animals, or gravity. Eventually, the seeds reach the ground, sprout, and grow into new plants, continuing the cycle of life.

Pollination by bees is incredibly efficient because of the way they move methodically between flowers of the same kind during a single foraging trip. While they’re focused on gathering food, they’re also completing a vital step in the plant life cycle—one that supports everything from wild forests to the food we eat.