In spring you can see flowers on fruit trees. This is called “blossoming”. No fruit can grow on fruit trees without these flowers.

 

Pollination of a flower. However, “blossoming” alone is not enough.  The male pollen of one flower needs to be transported to the female pistil of another flower before pollination can occur.

 

And this does not happen without some help.  The wind, for example, can make it happen.  

 

If the light and fine pollen is carried by the wind to the pistil of another flower, pollination will occur.  This is called: “wind pollination”. This is good, but nature has even better ways to take care of this.

 

 

Bee visits blossom

The flowers secrete a sweet liquid, called “nectar”. Some birds, all kinds of insects and especially bees are fond of this sweet juice.  They fly from flower to flower to drink it.  While they do this, they crawl deep into the flower and thus come in contact with the pollen of that flower.

 

Especially in the case of bees, this pollen sticks to the hair of their body.  

 

Sometimes they are completely covered in it.  

 

If they then visit the next flower, a little bit of pollen (1) from the first flower ends up on the pistil (2) of the flower they are visiting.  This is called “pollination”.

 

The pollen of one flower that has ended up on the pistil of another flower through the bee.

 

This is very important in early spring in particular.  There are many bees flying around in nature at that time and fruit trees only blossom during a short period of time.  In addition, bees keep flying to the same type of flowers as long as these flowers continue to provide nectar. In this manner we can be sure that all flowers are visited by a bee.

 

If apple trees are blossoming in spring, for example, a hive will be placed nearby.  A hive contains 10,000 worker bees who already fly out.  

 

If the weather is good each worker bee visits approximately 1500 flowers a day.  All bees taken together, this gives a total of 10,000 times 1,500 flowers or 15 million flowers on one day.Our apple trees, located within 2 kilometres from the hive, therefore are very likely to be visited by a bee with pollen on the hair of its body. And in case of good pollination the trees will produce plenty of beautiful and large apples.  Bees are therefore very important for fruit.

 

He furthermore has special clothing:  especially the hat with its protective veil is remarkable.