One Little Big Pollinator

Our Yoshino cherry tree, approaching full bloom in this photo, is providing a feast for the honeybees. I captured this busy lady last Thursday in the late afternoon. I'm grateful for all of the beneficial work she does. We're fortunate to have a neighbor who has set up several bee boxes on his property; I suspect this pollinator is one of his.

Worker bees do all the different tasks needed to maintain and operate the hive. They make up the vast majority of the hive's occupants and they are all sterile females. When young, they are called house bees, and they work in the hive doing comb construction, brood rearing, tending the queen and drones, cleaning, regulating temperature, and defending the hive. Older workers are called field bees. They forage outside the hive to gather nectar, pollen, water and certain sticky plant resins used in hive construction. Workers born early in the season will live about 6 weeks while those born in the fall will live until the following spring. Workers are about 12 mm long and highly specialized for what they do, having a structure called a pollen basket (or corbiculum) on each hind leg, an extra stomach for storing and transporting nectar or honey and four pairs of special glands that secrete beeswax on the underside of their abdomen. They have a straight, barbed stinger which can only be used once. It rips out of their abdomen after use, killing the bee.

As the field bees forage for nectar, pollen sticks to the fuzzy hairs which cover their bodies. Some of this pollen rubs off on the next flower they visit, fertilizing the flower and resulting in better fruit production. Some plants will not produce fruit at all without the help of honeybees. In the United States alone, it is estimated that honeybees accomplish 1/4 of the pollination needed for all fruit produced for human consumption - an estimated $10 billion worth of work each year!

The field bees stop periodically to groom themselves and collect the pollen onto their pollen baskets. They remove this load from their legs when they return to the hive and the house bees store it in a special part of the comb. The pollen provides protein and other essential nutrients for the bees.