A deal, not a favour
Why Do Bees Visit Flowers?
Bees come for food. Flowers pay them in nectar to carry pollen around.
-
Step 1 of 5
Plants cannot walk to each other.
To make seeds, pollen from one flower must reach another flower of the same kind. The plant needs a courier.
-
Step 2 of 5
Nectar is the payment.
Flowers make sugary nectar for no other reason than to attract visitors. It is a wage, produced specifically to be given away.
-
Step 3 of 5
Pollen sticks to the bee by accident.
Bee hair is branched and slightly charged, so pollen clings to it. The bee is not trying to carry it — it just cannot avoid it.
-
Step 4 of 5
The next flower collects it.
Round and round, all day, for a wage of sugar water. At the following flower some grains brush off onto the receptive part. That is pollination — and now the plant can make seeds.
-
Step 5 of 5
Bees stay loyal to one flower type at a time.
A foraging bee usually works one species per trip. That is precisely what the plant needs — pollen delivered to the right species.
A single hive can visit millions of flowers in a day. Around a third of what we eat depends on this arrangement.
The short version
A flower makes nectar purely to give it away, and the bee carries pollen entirely by accident — its hairs are branched and slightly charged. Loyalty to one species per trip is what makes the accident useful.
Try it yourself
Watch one bee for a minute in a mixed flowerbed. It will almost certainly stick to a single kind of flower.