What we learned about Honey Bees!

Honey bees help plants to make the fruit, vegetables and nuts we like to eat, by carrying pollen from one plant or flower to the next. Important crops like oats, corn and wheat are pollinated by the wind. But many other plants like apple trees, depend on birds, bats and insects.

Bees don’t wake up each morning and set off to go pollinating plants and flowers. Their instinct it to collect nectar from the flowers. They feed this sweet liquid to the Queen Bee. Even though the pollinating that they do is a very important job for the world, the bees do it by accident.

This is how it happens: If you look at a bee close up, you will see that they have hairy legs and bodies. The pollen on the flowers stick to their hairy bodies. Here is a picture:

Bee on Dandelion
Creative Commons License Photo Credit: Reinhold Stansich via Compfight

We have learned that our supermarket shelves would be empty of many of the fruits and vegetables that are available there, if it weren’t for bees. Click on this link to see a list of these.

As well as the fruit and vegetables that we eat, many of the animals that live on our farms, eat foods that bees pollinate. It is said that every third spoonful that we eat, we have thanks to the work of the honey bees.

Ms. Heneghan says that the almond farmers in California, pay bee keepers to bring their bee hives to California so that the bees will pollinate the almond trees. Honeybee pollination is so important that bee farmers actually truck their bees from orchard to orchard and farm to farm to help pollinate crops.

If there were no bees there would be no almonds. This job takes about six weeks and when the bees are finished they are sent to another part of the country to help with pollination there.

Sister Kathleen said, she knew a lady who used a small paintbrush to bring pollen from one apple tree to another, so that she would have enough apples in Autumn to make apple pies. There weren’t enough bees to do this where she lived.

Researched by Klaudia, Sinead, Zara and Sarah from Fourth Class

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