1. clock
  2. Bees Gone Wild

Bees Gone Wild

By clock on September 24, 2006.

Wild Bees Make Honeybees Better Pollinators

How?

By sexual harrassment!

Wild bees behave like the male audience of Girls Gone Wild - obnoxious and aggressive. So, the honeybees keep running away from them - from flower to flower.

Winners: Flowers.

Seriously:

Compared to honeybees, wild bees did not contribute much directly to crop pollination. But on farms where wild bees were abundant, honeybees were much more effective in pollinating flowers and generating seeds, Greenleaf found.

There appear to be two reasons for that. Male wild bees, probably looking for mates, will latch onto worker honeybees, which are sterile females, causing them to move from one flower to another. Secondly, female wild bees appear to "dive bomb" honeybees, forcing them to move. Frequent movement between flowers spreads pollen around more effectively.

"Divebomb!"

Tags
animal behavior

More like this

Let's Give Three Bronx Cheers for Bumblebees!
tags: Bumblebees, Bombus species, Hymenoptera, insects, entomology, natural history Common Eastern Bumblebee, Bombus impatiens. This species is often relied upon to pollinate commercial food crops, such as tomatoes, that are often grown in agricultural greenhouses. Image: Wikipedia [larger view…
Orchid Hacks
The emotions that other species summon up in the human brain are perplexing. A lion inspires awe and respect. It is the king of the jungle, a great name for a football team, a noble guardian of the entrance to the New York Public Library. A tapeworm, on the other hand, summons disgust mixed with a…
Friday Find: Declining pollinators and the importance of wild bees
Loss of species that pollinate is cause for global alarm, researchers say: Birds, bees, bats and other species that pollinate North American plant life are losing population, according to a study released Wednesday by the National Research Council. This "demonstrably downward" trend could damage…
The Beauty of Deceit
Sometimes a picture can tell you a lot about evolution. This particular picture has a story to tell about how two species--in this case a fly and an orchid--can influence each other's evolution. But the story it tells may not be the one you think. Coevolution, as this process is now called, was one…

Bee sure to pass that link and explanation around to Bushwell. Sounds like it could contribute to a very interesting twist in her "flower porn" story.