The bee tree
The lumps on the bees hind legs are bee pollen “grains” made up of hundreds of thousands of pollen spores. The bee’s hairy body, usually moistened with honey and nectar, picks up the pollen as it goes from plant to plant. The pollen grain is carried to the hive where it is unloaded into cells and used as food for the bees and their young – it is sometimes known as “bee bread”. In the wild, the bees in a single hive need to collect around 60 pounds of pollen in a year to survive.
Uploaded on March 27, 2012