Life Buzzing and The Real Progress
What a tiny thing means to our lives
If I tell you that bees are an essential insect alive today, would you believe me?
From its simple body parts of the head, thorax and abdomen to complex flight strategy to organised political hive societies — there is much more than you imagine about these little unnoticed buzzers, which do not always come down to honeybees only.
Our comprehension of bees is directly related to honey, sting, buzzing noise and pollination.
None of these are wrong, but a broader world is ready to be explored. And believe it or not, this knowledge about bees and pollination could help human society better understand who we are and why we are here in the first place.
Before continuing this track, we should touch upon some basics about plants, flowers and pollination.
The Fundamentals of Plant’s Evolution
Plants (mainly tracheophytes), as some of you know, can be divided into two categories: angiosperms and gymnosperms. I do not want to extend this ‘technical me’ as it can become quite dull, so I will quickly explain those terms.
Angiosperms are flowering plants, and gymnosperms are conifers that have instead naked seeds allocated inside a protecting female cone called strobilus. Do not worry about this terminology for now.
As its name says, flowering plants have flowers, a wide variety of flowers. They can be of different shapes, colours, sizes, locations, aromas and textures.
Flowers and cones are just one of many other organs of a plant where reproduction of the species occurs. For this reproduction to happen, or “sexual interaction” if you may, you must have pollen to pollinate. These are tiny light puffed balls, varied in sizes and easily caught by the wind (in this case, to pollinate conifers) or by a pollinator.
That is when bees become the leading players among other insects (at least renowned). They are the most proficient pollinators of our natural world. In Australia alone, we have more than 1,700 native bee species.
As you can see, this article could extend for years until we thoroughly and genuinely understand these little buggers — more than a lifetime to be honest.
Hopefully, from these basic concepts above, you might understand better when you read the headlines: “bees are disappearing, so our food”, or even “we cannot survive without bees”.
Bees control the Game of Life
Even though it might be unclear, if you carefully grasp the bee’s function or any other pollinator, it needs to carry the plant’s pollen to survive. The pollen needs to arrive at a specific element, often erect, inside the flower called pistil.
The pistil is nothing more than the structure responsible for transporting the pollen to then initiate the fecundation process. There are two sections that the pollen must go through before arriving at the ovary: stigma and style. These three are responsible for carrying the flowering plant species’ next generation with all its genetic mishmash. Without it, you wouldn’t have several thousands of diversified and intriguing flowering species ruling worldwide.
Although this might surprise you, you may still ask: could a plant exist without pollination? A bit of a difficult one to answer, really. You might have to rewind millions of years of evolutionary biology databases available to find a compelling answer, so I recommend keeping it simple.
Bees have an essential job despite some plants self-reproducing by interacting with anthers and stigmas. The incredible thing is that they do not even care about this job, nor are they aware of what they do.
This process of pollination, allowing plants to reproduce, generating a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, and observing insects transferring pollen from one flower to another, is done unintentionally. That’s right.
When a pollinator, in this case, a bee, lands on the flower petals looking for nectar, it will extend its long tongue (proboscis) to reach the juice. Depending on the flower structure, the bee has to squeeze its body through an area that contains pollen attached to the stamen, a male organ composed of a filament and anther (a stalk-like shape structure generally in numbers).
The bee then accumulates pollen around its hairy body surface, pushing down into tiny sacs glued to its rear legs, flying away to another flower soon after. This process transfers pollen from flower to flower, helping to produce offspring. Simple as that.
We could debate for hours about the bee’s neurological functions and almost concede to the hypothesis that they could have some sort of “intelligence”, but it is not the aim of this article, just in case you are thinking about it.
Flowers and Bees are part of a mutualistic co-evolution
Which means they benefit from one another. It is hard to think if you are not used to science. Still, Bianca Amanto from the University of Adelaide, a specialist in how flowers attract bees, could not describe this process any better. As she asserts, flowers evolved with different shapes and colours to accommodate specific pollinators.
Some flowers will be more attractive to bees than others. For instance, some orchids evolved by a tiny wasp, making it pollinate them by a swing movement while sitting on top of one of the petals. This process would allow the flower to self-reproduce (anthers touching stigmas) due to the wasp vibration whilst looking for nectar. It is an intelligent strategy on behalf of the plant.
It is also the beauty of different sexual mechanisms that evolved for millions of years.
The truth is we need pollination to have food on the table. Food that we, modern humans, cannot live without it. Most of us do not plant and harvest food anymore, as in the old days. Buying from a supermarket does not allow you to see the complete picture nor how this whole ecosystem works.
To clarify, we are not the centre of the food chain at all. We do depend on several living organisms, especially bees. On some occasions, pollination can be done by hand, like the flat-leaved vanilla (Vanilla planifolia). Still, it is not always sustainable nor efficient as having a specific insect that lives and breathes carrying pollen (eventually taking to their hive) and providing pollination to benefit plants and food on the table.
I would like to finish this article with a simple discussion about ecosystem services, pointing out the benefits people get from a stable environment. Only then we might respect our natural world as part of a delicate live web that, once disturbed, could hardly get fixed by us correctly.
The Ecosystem Services
When you think about ecosystem services, you have to imagine a grid of life, with living organisms depending on one another. The top ones of the grid are the apex predators, and the bottom is the primary producers.
Using the Australian environment as an example, Dingo is the top predator, and plants are the primary producers. We have mesopredators composed of snakes, lizards, kangaroos and pests like foxes and feral cats. You find the secondary consumers, which include possums and bats.
You may also find the primary consumers, such as birds and other pollinators, including bees from secondary. We do not pollinate, but we heavily consume and often kill top predators like Dingo. In theory, we may cause a handful of disarrangements in the whole ecosystem services — shame on us.
On top of this, for the plants to ideally produce, we cannot forget the decomposers. This group comprises fungi, bacteria, earthworms, and essential living organisms that the ecosystem could not thrive without. And this applies to us too.
So, why do you think bees are important?
Firstly, as I said, it is an essential part of ecosystem services. Secondly, it plays a vital role in unintentionally pollinating flowers to reproduce species and consecutively providing us food — thank you, dear buzzer.
Third, these are unique living beings with organised societies under political and social behaviour and job roles — just like us. But for this one, I will leave the discussion to another article in the future.
Next time you see a honeybee or a native bee flying around you, please do not get scared. It is not interested in you, but most likely in the colour of your shirt. You could simply observe what it does, and I guarantee you will be astonished by its beauty and hard work. It could perhaps inspire you to become a different human being. Who knows?
Thanks for reading!
