Why is all the buzz only around honey bees, ask researchers Premium

The word bee almost always conjures up a singular image: a furry insect with striking yellow-and-black stripes and huge eyes collecting nectar as it buzzes from one flower to another, carrying the nectar back to its crowded hive and converting it into thick, amber honey to nourish the colony.

The word bee almost always conjures up a singular image: a furry insect with striking yellow-and-black stripes and huge eyes collecting nectar as it buzzes from one flower to another, carrying the nectar back to its crowded hive and converting it into thick, amber honey to nourish the colony.

“Even in art, when you say bee, it is drawn with yellow and black stripes, with a honeycomb background, a typical honey bee,” says Chethana V. Casiker, Senior Research Fellow, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE). 

While this is the most prevalent portrait of the bee in popular culture, it represents only a small minority of these insects: of the 20,000-odd species of bees in the world, only eight are honeybees. “We are so attuned to thinking that bees make honey, but most bees are not honey bees. One familiar example is the large black carpenter bee,” she says. In fact, most bees aren’t even social insects as is commonly believed. Though some of them, such as honeybees, bumblebees and stingless bees are organised into complex societies, the majority end up leading a more solitary lifestyle.

Solitary bees, like all other bee species, play a crucial role in pollination but do not receive anywhere close to the attention they deserve. Chethana and her colleagues at ATREE are trying to change that. She is part of the team behind The Bee Garden Project, which seeks to better understand these poorly studied bees and highlight their ecological importance in urban landscapes. “Through this project, we hope to spread awareness about bees that look different and behave differently (from honeybees) but are still very important.” 

If you’ve enjoyed a meal containing tomatoes, chillies, eggplants, gourds or lentils, guess who you probably have to thank for it? That’s right: solitary bees.

Solitary bees are accomplished pollinators, making them an essential component of human food systems. “Since they don’t have pollen baskets (a modified part of the hindlegs of honey bee workers) where they brush and tightly pack all the pollen into, they end up collecting more dry pollen all over their body. This helps pollen get passed around more easily,” says Chethana. Also, these bees are more effective in pollination than honey bees. “They are strong fliers and can visit a lot of different flowers.”

Additionally, many solitary bees perform a behaviour called buzz pollination, significant for plants, including many important sources of our food, that have something called poricidal anthers. These anthers (anthers are part of the male sex organ of a flower called stamen and contain pollen which produces sperm cells) are shaped in such a way that it makes it difficult for them to release pollen without help from buzz pollinators.