Green Schools: Biodiversity: Pollination – An Important Job that Bees Do.

As part of the work we are doing in school for our fifth Green School Flag on the theme of Biodiversity, we are learning about bees and pollination.

Honey bees help plants to make the fruit and nuts we like to eat, by carrying pollen from one plant or flower to the next. Important crops like oats, corn and wheat are pollinated by the wind. But many other plants like apple trees, depend on birds, bats and insects.

Bees don’t wake up each morning and set off to go pollinating plants and flowers. Their instinct it to collect nectar from the flowers. They feed this sweet liquid to the Queen Bee. Even though the pollinating that they do is a very important job for the world, the bees do it by accident.

This is how it happens: If you look at a bee close up, you will see that they have hairy legs and bodies. The pollen on the flowers stick to their hairy bodies.

Here is a picture:

Bee on Dandelion

Creative Commons License Photo Credit: Reinhold Stansich via Compfight

We have learned that our supermarket shelves would be empty of many of the fruits and vegetables that are available there, if it weren’t for bees. Click on this link  to see a list of these on our school’s Green School Blog.

As well as the fruit and vegetables that we eat, many of the animals that live on our farms, eat foods that bees pollinate. It is said that every third spoonful that we eat, we have thanks to the work of the honey bees. If bees weren’t around to pollinate the plants, we wouldn’t have a choice of as many different foods to eat.

If you would like to read more about bees and pollination, check out these useful links.

Many thanks to Klaudia, Sinead, Zara and Sarah from Fourth Class for researching this information.

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