It turns out honey bees aren’t just interested in honey — these hard workers bake bread by the basketful. Take a DeepLook at bee bread, the pollen creation that serves as a bee’s main source of protein. (KQED)
Spring means honey bees flitting from flower to flower. In California, this frantic insect activity that starts in late winter and continues through the summer is essential to growing foods like almonds, cherries, raspberries and apples. Bees move pollen, making it possible for plants to grow the fruit and seeds they need to reproduce.
Young adult female bees distribute the stored pollen to the whole colony. They eat bee bread to make a liquid food similar to mammal’s milk that they feed to growing larvae and adult bees, including the queen. They also give little bits of bee bread to older larvae. On a warm March morning, hives in white wooden boxes lined the road between rows of almond trees loaded with white flowers. Bees came and went. Almond pollen, which is light yellow, is nutritious and sought after by honey bees, said the USDA’s Carroll.“The almond pollination event, it’s the time of the year that for most parts of the United States there’s really nothing else available,” Carroll said.
Bees make honey with nectar they collect in the afternoon. They spend their mornings collecting pollen, and they’re well-equipped to do so, with three million hairs that help them trap the grains.Honey bees even have hairs on their eyes, said, a doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who is looking at the process of pollen collection up close.
“They’re transferring the pollen from one brush to another, between their legs,” said Matherne. “It’s kind of like running a comb through your own hair.”As it flies from bloom to bloom, the bee combs the pollen very quickly and moves it into baskets on its hind legs called corbiculae . Each basket is made up of a concave section of the hind leg, which is covered by longish hairs that bend over and around the pollen.
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