It’s summer where I live, and that means it’s almost time for some of my favorite fruits to be ready to eat, like strawberries, peaches, and cherries! If you love fruit as much as I do, do you know who you should thank for it? Bees! That’s right, bees do more than just make honey. They play an important role in helping us enjoy all kinds of yummy fruits!
Last time, we followed a honey bee as she went about her day. One of the things we learned was that her most important job is to find and get food. She does this by flying around to lots of different flowers and collecting some of their sweet nectar.
Let’s take a closer look at a flower. If we look really closely, we can see that it has lots of different parts. You probably already know the name of one of these parts. If you said ‘petals,’ you’re right! The parts on the outside of the flower are called petals. But have a look at this part inside the flower. It’s called the stamen, and it makes a yellow dust that we call pollen.
If you carefully touch the top of this part of the flower, some of the yellow dust will probably come off on your finger. Pollen can also make some people sneeze, especially if there’s a lot of it. But if you want to have fruit, you have to have pollen! The pollen needs to travel from the stamen of one flower to a different part of another flower. And when it does, a tiny fruit will start to grow inside the flower!
Where does the pollen have to go? To this part of a flower, called the pistil. It’s kind of long and looks a little like a vase or a bowling pin. The very top of the pistil is kind of flat, and it’s covered with sticky, gooey stuff that’s almost like glue. If pollen touches this gooey stuff, it gets stuck. Then, little bits of the pollen move down into the bottom of the pistil. When that happens, the bottom starts to grow and swell up. It gets bigger and changes color, and the petals of the flower fall off. What’s left is what we call fruit!
To get fruit, it’s important that pollen gets moved from the stamen of one flower to the pistil of another flower, and that some pollen gets stuck to the top of a flower’s pistil. This whole process is called pollination. And this is where bees come in.
You might remember that bees get their food by drinking nectar from a flower. While a bee is moving around in a flower looking for nectar, little bits of pollen from the stamen stick to her legs, wings, and fuzzy body. Then she flies off to another flower to get more food. As the bee crawls all over the next flower, she bumps into the flower’s pistil. Some of the pollen from the bee’s body gets stuck to the top of the pistil. Then, if everything goes according to plan, in time, we’ll get a nice piece of fruit!
All of your favorite fruits start out this way, from tiny blueberries to giant watermelons! And bees aren’t the only animals that pollinate flowers. Moths, butterflies, even bats and hummingbirds drink nectar from flowers. When they do, they often carry pollen with them. But bees are some of the busiest and most important pollen-carriers around. So, the next time you enjoy a sweet summer treat like a peach or a cherry, you can thank a bee!
Thanks for joining me on SciShow Kids. Do you have a question about insects or elephants or anything else? If so, get help from a grownup, and let us know! You can leave us a comment below or send us an email at [email protected].
