Mad About Science: Pollinators and plants

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

Blue skies interrupted by walls of thick gray clouds, the occasional downpour of rain and a sporadic coating of morning snow are all signs that spring has arrived. 

By now, you’re likely seeing bright daffodil flowers greeting you in the morning and calling out to the early pollinators brave enough to challenge the unpredictable chill of a panhandle spring. Bees are an important part of the life cycle of plants, but they aren’t the only pollinator in our ecosystem. Pollinators come in many forms, including bats, beetles, birds, butterflies, moths and wasps. Any creature that may benefit from climbing into a flower for a sugary treat is a potential pollinator that will help those very plants reproduce and impart their genes onto the next generation.

Courtesy photo.

Most pollinators have tastes suited to specific plants, but bees are famously generalistic. Bees seldom discriminate between flowers and other sources of sugar. 

In 2012, apiarists in Ribeauville in northeastern France noticed their bees were creating a strange blue-green honey. It was discovered that the bees had been pilfering waste material from a disposal facility two miles away that was emulsifying M&Ms that were no longer fit for human consumption.

Understanding how the honey became dyed by food waste requires some understanding of how bees create honey to begin with.

Foraging bees use their proboscises to siphon sugary sweet nectar from plants. While the bees are foraging on the flower, hairs on their bodies will snag pollen grains from the plant, which will be brushed off onto other plants as they forage to help the plants reproduce — an ingenious evolutionary development by plants that interact with the world primarily through chemical processes and touch. 

Nectar from the plant will end up being stored in a special digestive compartment of the bee called a honey stomach, where enzymes are produced to begin digesting and breaking down the nectar. Bees return to their hive and expel the nectar to local house bees, which will slurp it up and continue the process, often swapping the nectar to other bees until it becomes a thick honey they store in honeycombs, which acts as a food reserve for the winter.

Basically, honey is bee vomit, and it’s the reason that honey isn’t vegan. While it may not be technically vegan, a good apiarist isn’t simply robbing the bees, but is instead replacing the honey with a replacement food source for the winter. The apiarist has nothing to gain and everything to lose by stealing from or harming the bees, so this is effectively an interspecies trade.

The dye from the M&Ms was not able to be broken down by the bees’ honey stomach enzyme and it altered the color of the honey. 

Some folks would consider this a unique stroke of luck and a once-in-a-lifetime marketing opportunity, but the French apiarists were not enthused and had to discard the colorful honey. The waste material was contained and the bees returned to a more natural food source, but it proved to be an interesting indicator of just how adaptable bees can be.

Hummingbirds are another common pollinator in our area. Searching for the same sweet nectar as the bees, hummingbirds use their long tongues to probe a flower, grabbing pollen grains in addition to the nectar within. These pollen grains transfer to other flowers as the birds hover from plant to plant.

This is a common tactic for plants to reproduce around the world. Plants in Africa, such as the baobab tree, have a flower that will bloom at night and give off a musky, fruity scent to attract nocturnal fruit bats. Beetles are another pollinator, as are butterflies and certain kinds of moths.

As prevalent as flowering plants are, they are a relatively new evolutionary development, with the first flowering plants appearing around 130 million years ago. This is a vast expanse of time, but in respect to the duration in which plants have existed on Earth, these are mere moments in the scale of evolutionary history.

The earliest ancestors of plants were likely cyanobacteria, which is very similar to algae we recognize today. Cyanobacteria first started appearing in water around 1 billion years ago, eventually dying in vast quantities and being compressed into large reservoirs of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen compounds that humans would later extract as oil, which is later refined into plastics and gasoline. Terrestrial plants were believed to have first evolved from their aquatic ancestors around 470 million years ago. 

That means plants lived, reproduced and spread across the world for 340 million years before the first flower ever budded. 

This evolutionary tactic must have been exceptionally effective, as it led to an abundance of plants reproducing through flowers, while simultaneously influencing the evolution of countless species — including bees, certain bats, birds and a huge number of insects we recognize today.

It’s wild to think about a plant — a living thing that cannot see, hear or directly manipulate its immediate environment — decided to create a reservoir of sugar one day to attract a completely different animal to help spread its genes. 

Even more wild is that it’s likely that multiple different plants may have adapted this tactic simultaneously over the course of millions of years, until one developed the secret sauce that would influence life as we know it on Earth.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Plants are amazing.

Stay curious, 7B.