Importance of bees?

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Im aware of the fact that bees are important for the world but id love to know exactly why or how

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Anonymous 0 Comments

You know how, in humans and other familiar animals, to get offspring, it takes a sperm from one parent, and an egg from another, and something has to happen to get those two parts in the same place? Well, plants are the same way.

Plants have what we call male and female parts, often both on the same plant. The male part is what produces the kind of gamete— sex cell—, like a sperm, that moves around in the world, and the female part makes the kind that stays put (more or less) until it’s reached by and combined with the other.

In some kinds of plant, the mechanism is (conceptually but not anatomically) simple: the male parts of the plant make a ton of mobile-type gametes, called pollen, and toss it out into the wind, and just sort of hope it lands on a stationary-type gamete. The female parts of plants tend to have mechanisms for catching, grabbing, and pulling in pollen, and, combined with the huge amounts floating around in the air, that tends to work pretty well.

But there’s another mechanism that’s popular with plants, which is to get an *animal* to deliver pollen. This is what flowers are for; insects crawl or fly into them to eat a sugary liquid, and pollen, which is sticky in these species of plant, well, sticks to them. Then, when they crawl into another flower, hopefully on a different plant of the same species, it rubs off, and gets pulled down into the female parts of the flower to fertilize the stationary gamete there. Plants often wait until that happens before they direct nutrients into producing an offspring-package, like a seed or fruit. If there’s no viable offspring, after all, those nutrients would be wasted.

Bees are an animal that pollinate a lot of flowers. They’re not the only one, not by a long shot, but they’re the one that’s easiest for humans to manipulate, because they come in big packages called colonies or hives. A honeybee colony has something like ten to fifty thousand bees in it, and it’s smaller than a refrigerator. You can move it from place to place if you know what you’re doing. So if there are a lot of flowers you want to make sure get pollinated,— and they’re from a compatible species of plant— one thing you can do is plop a bunch of beehives down nearby, and let the bees do their thing. You might want to do that to make sure that, say, your apple trees’ flowers get pollinated, so they have lots of offspring-packages (apples) to fill with nutrients.

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