Usually we hear positive things about bees. Sometimes we hear about their illness and that might create a notion that without bees there will be no pollination. But our newest finding show bees in a different light.

Solitary bee (Anthidium florentinum), feeding on a Lantana camara flower
By Alvesgaspar GFDL or CC BY-SA 3.0], from Wikimedia Commons

And this is not about making bees look bad. It’s just facts. Findings from northern Europe show that bees aren’t really that important for a good harvest. This is evident if we take a look at numbers from good old England. During the eighties, the beekeeping industry was flourishing. But these days its different, the numbers of beekeepers (and thus bees) dwindle. But the amount of crops that need to be pollinated has actually gone up since then – from 8 % in the eighties to about 20 % in the year 2007 (and it’s still growing). Either that means that today's bees are capable of pollinating at least three times more hardworking or that their contribution to pollination is only about 10 – 15 %.

And now scientists from Pittsburgh show that bees might be not as industrious as we thought. They actually might be quite inefficient. Because it’s one thing to collect the pollen and another to take it where it needs to be. The scientists devised an experiment where they monitored twenty-three American Bellflowers since 2016 and watched what pollinators visited them and what they did with the pollen. They found that the bees are actually quite greedy and take all the pollen before the plants are ready to reproduce. The best seemed to be bumblebees. As it seems, when it comes to sex, even in the plant world, size does matter.

Sources:

• http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/285/1880/20180635.article-info
• https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180629102559.htm

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