Gardening With Bees

Gardening With Bees

- Dr Connel Eardley

Bees and flowers

Flowers provide food for bees. To plants they are sex organs. The origins of flowering plants and insect pollinators began simultaneously about 100 million years ago. Cross-pollinated plants use a vector, such as wind, water or an animal, mostly an insect, to deliver their pollen to a receptive stigma of another flower. Animal pollination requires that flowers attract pollinators, mostly for food (pollen, nectar and oils), but also through scent and/or visual cues. This co-evolution resulted in plants producing rewards for the service they receive, namely pollination, although the bees are blissfully unaware they’re performing a service.

Bees as pollinators

Bees are among the most important pollinators. Commonly, beetles, moths, bats and birds pollinate, and a host of other organisms may pollinate as well. Pollination precedes fertilisation in plants, but does not guarantee it. Therefore it also precedes plant reproduction, seed set and fruit production. Consequently, it is an essential ecosystem service, meaning that in the wild it directly contributes to the production of food for seed- and fruit eating animals, and ensures that there will be future generations of plants. The same applies to agriculture.