Accent on Natural Landscaping

Donna VanBuecken

Archives for April 2018

More on Pollination – Honey

Bees need two kinds of food. One we’ve already read about — pollen. The other is honey made from the nectar they gather from their visits to flowers. Nectar is the sugary juice that flowers offer to bees in return for the successful transportation of the pollen the flowers need to fulfill their reproductive process.

How do honeybees make honey?

As the worker honeybee sucks the nectar from the flower, she stores it in her nectar sac (a second stomach) ready to be transferred to the honey-making worker bees in the hive. If hungry, she opens a valve in the nectar sac and a portion of the nectar passes through to her stomach to be converted to energy.

Honeybee on a plum (Prunus) blossom while nectaring. Note pollen on its body and the pollen sac on its hind leg. Photo courtesy of wikipedia.org.

[Read more…]

More on Pollination – Pollen Sac

Well, I made my presentation and as you might guess there were a number of questions I couldn’t answer. One was how does a bee’s pollen sac hold pollen? Hm-m-m. That’s a good question.

Why do bees collect pollen?

Rusty Patched Bumblebee on Joe Pye Weed (Eupatorium perfoliaitum). Photo courtesy of Rich Hatfield, The Xerces Society.

To make  bee bread, of course. Pollen contains protein and fats — nutritious substances bees need to raise developing larvae and to live their adult lives successfully. Bees harvest pollen from a variety of blooming plants to help provide the most complete nutrition for the baby bees and the healthiest colony. Pollen is also important for the development of the queen bee’s reproductive process. [Read more…]

Pollination continued

In my earlier post about Gardening for Pollinators, I talked primarily about pollinators and flowering plants, also known as angiosperms. But there’s a whole other group of plants out there which require pollen as well — specifically grasses and trees.  Grasses are angiosperms, however, trees are typically referred to as gymnosperms.The difference between these types of plants is that angiosperms have ovaries, while gymnosperms do not. [Read more…]