How many bees visit can pollinate a single sunflower head?

The Pollination

Pollination The honeybees provide pollination services, thereby playing a vital role in food production and overall agricultural productivity. Over 75% of all the crops in sub Saharan Africa benefit from pollination. Bees are considered the most efficient pollinators because they have hairy bodies which easily pick up pollen grains as they move about in flowers. During a single day one bee may visit several hundred flowers. So bees are important to farmers. More bees means better pollination and high yields. In other countries pollination by bees is hired and fetches additional money to the beekeeper. 

Hard Working 

Most of flowers crops and food are required the pollination for fruiting. That's the process moving small cells to transfer the transfer between to make grains. When bee's sits on flowers the hairs on their legs attract the pollen from flowers some of the pollen spread on other flowers and the result is to make the flowers pollination.

Some of pollen they collect and store in their hive to food source of protein. The flowers also reward the bees for their hard work. That certainly holds true when you think about the important job they do for flowers and crops. 

About 5,000!

If you think that’s amazing, consider this: To make one Pound of Honey. A hive of bees must travel over 55,000 miles and visit two million flowers! Yes, bees certainly are busy. And today, they face many difficulties in their life during visiting the flowers.

Where would our world be without these hard-working furry insects? We’d rather not find out!

Daily visits

A honeybee flies out about 30 times a day (on a sunny day), and visits about 100 flowers each time, so 3000 flowers are visited per day. About 6 million flowers are needed to make a jar of 500 g of honey. So it would take 1 bee 2000 days (but a bee only lives about 50 days). It would take 200 bees 10 days. And the bees would have to fly in total 40 000 km (= once around the world) for just 1 jar of honey.

Sunflowers 

Pollinators make foraging decisions based on numerous floral traits, including nectar and pollen rewards, and associated visual and olfactory cues. For insect-pollinated crops, identifying and breeding for attractive floral traits may increase yields. In this study, we examined floral trait variation within cultivated sunflowers and its effects on bee foraging behaviors. During bloom, we recorded visits by both managed honey bees and wild bees. We then examined consistency in relative nectar production by comparing field results to those from a greenhouse experiment. Sunflower inbred lines varied significantly in all floral traits, including the amount and composition of nectar sugars, and in corolla length. Both wild bee and honey bee visits significantly increased with nectar sugar amount and decreased with corolla length, but appeared unaffected by nectar sugar composition. While wild bees made more visits to sunflowers providing pollen (male-fertile), honey bees preferred plants without pollen (male-sterile). Differences in nectar quantity among greenhouse-grown sunflower lines were similar to those measured in the field, and bumble bees preferentially visited lines with more nectar in greenhouse observations.

bees on sunflower

 

Selecting for these traits could thus increase sunflower crop yields and provide greater floral resources for bees.

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