Bees and pollination
Bees and pollination: how flowers and insects depend on each other. Bees visit flowers for nectar, pollen sticks to their bodies and transfers to the next flower. Without pollination many plants cannot make seeds or fruit. Why bees matter for the food we eat.
What a learner can do afterwards
- Describe how pollen moves from one flower to another when a bee visits to collect nectar
- Explain that many fruits and vegetables depend on bees or other insects for pollination
- State what would happen to a garden or farm if there were no pollinating insects
The lesson
Bees do more than make honey. When a bee lands on a flower, it drinks a sweet liquid called nectar. While it moves around, a fine, powdery dust called pollen sticks to the tiny hairs all over its body.
Zara watches a bee land on a yellow squash flower to drink nectar. Pollen dust covers its legs. The bee flies off and lands on another squash flower nearby, brushing some pollen loose. Because of that pollen, the second flower can now grow into a squash.
Many foods you eat, like apples, strawberries, and almonds, only grow because a bee or another insect carried pollen to the flower first. Without pollinators, farms and gardens would grow much less food.
Bees carry pollen between flowers while collecting nectar, and that pollen is what lets many fruits and vegetables grow.
Watch it
Where it sits
This opens up
Where this leads
Jobs that lean on this skill. Follow one to see everything it is built on.
8 questions wait behind this lesson, each with its answer explained. Every answer feeds the sky: stars light as they are learned, and dim when it is time to come back.