Articles

Do Bees Need Beautiful Flowers?

by Erik Osterlund

The following is an email answer to this question: According to the encyclopedia, bees feed exclusively on nectar and pollen from flowers—mostly the nectar. Yet their bodies are designed to collect pollen. They distribute this to other plants of the same species assisting the fruiting process. If bees evolved 225 million years ago and the flowering plants evolved 135 million years ago, then what did the bees eat for those 90 million years?

The answer was provided (in February 2002) by Erik Osterlund, a professional beekeeper in Sweden. (Karl)

Bees feed on every sweet source they can find, for energy, and every kind of similarity of pollen for protein. Sweet sources are mainly nectar from flowers, but in great deal also leftovers from aphids feeding on plants.

These leftovers, very rich in sugar, are left as thick white drops on leaves and pine needles then called honeydew. Both nectar and honeydew originate from plant juices. The interesting here is that honey dew does not appear in the middle of a nice flower to attract any insect. The sweetness itself is enough to draw the attention to the drop. And this drop has no benefit whatsoever for the plant or the aphid as far as I can see.

The point here is that the bee does not need a beautiful flower to be intersected to visit a source of sweeties. Actually, the higher the sugar content is, the more attractive is the nectar, and the flower. Appearance has nothing to do with it. It’s a myth. So the so called co-evolution of bees and flowers is a myth, created by the evolutionist to explain why there are beautiful flowers around. Besides, bees and insects do not see colors the same was as we do. And how in the world do we know if insects at all think something is beautiful? No, the beautifulness is there for those that can appreciate that which is beautiful, and the only creatures we know for sure who do that are humans. So, beautiful things are beautiful for us to appreciate, put into existence by our Creator.

Concerning pollen. Sure, the bee is designed to pick up pollen as food, but the pollination business is not accomplished by that, but by the many hairs that is covering the body of the bee. The bee is like a little paintbrush which our Lord uses when putting it into a flower filling its hairs with pollen and taking it into another flower (!)—of the same kind—brushes off some pollen there to pollinate that flower. A honeybee is extremely faithful to the same species of flower it has started to visit. Why? For the benefit of itself? No, but for the benefit of that species of flower, otherwise it wouldn’t be pollinated. Pollen from another type of flower wouldn’t do the job. But, in the sping for example, when pollen sources can be scarce, bees can collect many things which appear to benefit as protein sources. If you put out a plate with flour they collect it, crawling around in it. But when real flowers are flowering they find the good stuff there.

Actually nothing can give them what they need (for more than a short time), but the proteins in pollen. Many have tried to mix numbers of different flours and give it directly to the bees to get the bee colony to develop early in the season, that is—raise a lot of brood early to get a big population to get them ready for very early flows of nectar, so they can gather big crops from these early flows. But you always have to have collected real pollen and mixed it into these mixtures. Otherwise the brood production will decrease again after a number of weeks.

Nothing can replace pollen as the protein source for the bees. The conclusion then is that bees can’t develop without flowering plants. And how did the plants know (when man can’t) what kind of proteins to put into the pollen so that bees can thrive on it?