Western Honey Bee

Here's a Western Honeybee harvesting nectar and pollen from late last summer. She drinks nectar in 2 ways:
  1. When drinking something with relatively little sugary nectar, she'll drink by sucking.
  2. When drinking something sugary and more viscous, she'll lap it up.
She's also bringing pollen back to the hive for food. You can see the orangish globe on the abdomen; that's her pollen basket. While nectar mostly provides the carbohydrates that bees need, pollen provides them with protein. Fortunately for plants, while honeybees take as much pollen as they can for their own needs, they still end up spilling some of it, pollinating many plants while doing so.

Though there is no doubt that honeybees are important to agriculture, they can contribute to the decline of native pollinators and the spread of non-native plants. It would probably be better if honeybees could be restricted to pollinating crops rather than mixing with nature, though that goal falls somewhere between impractical and impossible.

September 19, 2021 at Duke Farms
Photo 168281267, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)


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