How Bees Carry Their Baggage

Think your airline's bag fees are burdensome? Try flying after swallowing part of your luggage and strapping the rest to your legs. That's how bees do it. And depending on how a bumblebee loads herself up with nectar and pollen, her flight back to the hive might be less of a beeline than usual. Like honeybees, bumblebees gather both nectar and pollen, bringing them back to the hive for food. They collect nectar simply by drinking it. After being slurped up a bee's long tongue, nectar is stored in a kind of pre-stomach. Pollen, meanwhile, goes into "pollen baskets." These are scoop-shaped surfaces on the bee's back legs, surrounded by stiff hairs. After a flower sprinkles a worker bee with pollen, she can groom the grains into her baskets for storage. In the photo above, the big yellow blob on the bee's haunch is a full pollen basket. To learn ...