From my understanding: I get that for honeybees, they need the nectar to make honey (their energy food source) and the pollen is an additional, essential food source for them which contains protein. They collect both nectar and pollen from flowers. For other pollinators like wasps, they don’t make honey but they still need to eat nectar and pollen which they collect from flowers. Though these pollinators benefit (survive/thrive) by collecting nectar and pollen from flowers, they also help plants to reproduce by carrying pollen between them and depositing it.

But why do they transfer pollen to other flowering plants? Of course this allows certain plants to reproduce, but that doesn’t explain why these pollinators care about helping plants reproduce. Are they little plant farmers who actually realise that transferring pollen and therefore making more plants, would benefit them? That would seem to demonstrate pretty high-level intelligence and foresight, planning wouldn’t it? Or is it just incidental that they’re going between flowers collecting nectar and pollen and happen to drop some pollen from previous flowers along the way?

I really struggled to find any information on the “WHY” of what bees are doing, from their own psychology point of view.

  • Offlein@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    This is funny, and really speaks to a fundamental issue we have during education as to assigning agency for what amount to"random" events.

    OP is presumably educated and intelligent, and the takeaway they had was that bees “are pollinators” which is true with regard to our interest in them, but definitely implies agency that they are intentionally pollinating, which (I am pretty sure) isn’t true.

    It feels like the same question that gets asked in a million different ways of “why did XYZ evolve that way when ABCD?” (Because evolution is random and tends toward selecting for energy conservation. Not to “achieve” some specific goal.)