The Secret Life of Bees

It's time to leave your hive, or your underground burrow, and forage for pollen. Pollen is the stuff that flowers use to reproduce. But it’s also essential grub for you, other bees in your hive and your larvae. Once you’ve gathered pollen to take home, you or another bee will mix it with water and flower nectar that other bees have gathered and stored in the hive. But how do you decide which flowers to approach? What draws you in?

In a review recently published in the journal Functional Ecology, with the imposing title, "Plant-Pollinator Interactions From Flower to Landscape: Assessment of Pollen Rewards by Foraging Bees," researchers Elizabeth Nicholls and Natalie Hempel de Ibarra asked: What is a flower like from a bee’s perspective, and what does the pollinator experience as it gathers pollen? And that's why we're talking to you in the second person: to help you understand how bees like you, while hunting for pollen, use all of your senses — taste, touch, smell and more — to decide what to pick up and bring home.

Maybe you're ready to go find some pollen. But do you even know where to look?

If you’re a honeybee, keep an eye on how your fellow hive members dancewhen they return from their latest pollen collection outing. They’ll give you clues to where to find a good pollen score. Watch as a fellow bee moves in the shape of a figure eight and waggles only where the eight crosses: The angle of that waggle tells you in which direction to head out from the hive. The speed of the waggle tells you how far to go. But honeybees don’t just dance for the good stuff, so you can’t necessarily trust your hive mates’ recommendations. When pollen stores are low, they’ll dance for substances like potato starch, too. Yuck!

Your sense of smell is so powerful you can use it to learn about and remember pollens. You prefer the scent of flowers with pollen, especially ones you’ve experienced before. This suggests you can detect pollen at a distance, and remember its odor, too. But the pollen's odor alone is not enough. You’ll probably go for a bouquet of odors, which you can learn if rewarded with sugar in the lab. Scientists are still trying to figure out if you can smell the amino acids that make up the pollen, and if you can tell which flowers have more pollen by scent alone. You can do that with nectar from far away — by detecting the smell of other bees that were there before you, you know not to waste your time with a depleted energy source. Can you do the same thing with pollen?

Bees like you have hunted for pollen seemingly forever. You took it from plants and moved it around between them. This helped the plants make fruit, and reproduce. At the same time, bees like you used the pollen, packed with protein and fats, to nourish yourselves, develop sex organs and feed your young. Moving it to other plants wasn’t your intention.

But the plants may have been letting you get away with too much pollen, hindering their ability to reproduce in greater numbers. During the Late Cretaceous Period, when plants and animals were dying off all over the planet, including the dinosaurs, the plants adapted ways to limit how much pollen bees ate. One of their adaptations was to produce nectar. It rewarded bees when they visited flowers. It had sugar and amino acids that bees used for energy, and they would eat that instead of pollen in some cases.

For years, many scientists focused their study of bees on how they gathered nectar. They found that bees learned to make judgments about nectar, like which flowers kept the sweetest juice flowing the most often, and remembered those flowers by different characteristics, like their scent or their color.

But while nectar’s sugars and amino acids help bees keep moving, pollen’s protein and fat are essential to the reproductive cycles of you and your fellow bees. That's one reason scientists recently took a closer look at how you gather pollen, and why we're following you on your pollen-gathering rounds right now.

You’re not eating the pollen while you’re on the flower. But you may sample its taste as you’re packing it, thanks to the taste receptors on your feet, antennae and mouthparts. Scientists used to think taste wasn’t that important, because you don’t have as many genes for them as other insects do. But we know your taste receptors respond to sugars, salt and toxins, and scientists suspect proteins too, if you're a honeybee. You’re actually pretty sensitive to tasting sugars, which means you can use them as rewards to learn associations with other flower characteristics -- like the protein content of its pollen, at least in lab experiments. Being able to taste all these flavors could help you remember your pollen experience and learn what pollens may contain toxins that plants produced to limit your consumption.

Eyesight may not be the strongest of your senses if you're a bee.

Your eyes are small, and you’re pretty nearsighted. But you can distinguish colors, associate them with pollen rewards and remember those associations, for up to a week. You’re probably looking at the whole flower, not just part of it. But you’re also choosy. When scientists Felicity Muth, Daniel Papaj and Anne Leonard colored a fake plant’s petals and anther — the thing that looks like a tiny microphone covered in pollen — and paired those with a pollen reward, bumblebees tended to prefer colored petals, not anthers, as indicators of rewards, probably because they’re bigger and more visible. It may be true for you as well.  In their paper "Bees Remember Flowers for More Than One Reason:  Pollen Mediates Associative Learning," in the Journal Animal Behavior, Muth, Papaj and Leonard argue that plants offer a number of rewards to pollinators besides nectar.  They posit that bees can learn to associate multiple floral features with a pure pollen reward. 

When you collect pollen, there are certain movements many of you perform every time, like grooming and packing the pollen in particular ways. Bumblebees and carpenter bees, for instance, shake pollen from some flowers’ anthers during buzz pollination. They can adjust how long or vigorously they shake, depending on how much pollen they feel coming out.

The hairs on your legs detect pressure to gauge the pollen balls you’re carrying on your legs. You can probably sense how big they are, and their shape. Perhaps you can assess the difficulty of packing and transporting them.

Scientists know that you can form associative memories with touch, and believe that activating these motor patterns on a flower can help you remember your experience there.

Most of you would rather stick with pollen or flowers you’ve experienced, because it takes a lot of work to handle the stuff. We think you get accustomed to how you pack familiar pollen together onto the hairs on your body. Maybe you return to the same types of flowers because you already know the right tricks to access their pollen.

But you’re not too set in your ways. After a while, you’ll start sampling new pollen, especially if the kind you’re used to starts to run out. And you’ll get used to that pollen, too.

Romney looks sick.  That under-the-table action may be a little nauseating.  But then, he lost his dignity on the way in so what's a little nausea on top of some shameless groping and groveling?