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Animal Themes
Insects
Invertebrates

Bees and Humans

Bees and Humans
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   grades 4 to 7
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   7.93

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    digest, drones, pollen-producing, mating, diets, regurgitate, saliva, species, pollen, mass, important, especially, lower, brushes, male, fertilize

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Other Languages
     Spanish: Las abejas y los seres humanos

Bees and Humans   
1     Bees are very important to humans from at least two standpoints - pollination and honey. Several species of bees (such as honeybees and bumblebees) have two "pollen baskets", one on each of their hind legs. When bees make a brief stop on one flower to suck nectar with their long tongues, their hairy bodies, especially their hairy hind legs, pick up grains of pollen from the stamens (the male pollen-producing part of a flower). Then, bees use "combs" or "pollen brushes", located on the lower part of their legs, to gather all the pollen grains into one mass and store it in their pollen baskets. However, when bees fly from one flower to another, some of the pollen grains that they have collected get rubbed off on flowers that they are visiting at the time. These rubbed off pollen grains help fertilize flowers and result in producing better crops as well as seeds and fruits.
 
2     As bees have their pollen baskets filled up, they fly back to their nests, called colonies, to unload their collections of pollen and nectar. Nectar? That's right! When bees suck nectar from flowers, they do not digest it. Instead, they mix nectar with their saliva and store the mixture in their honey sacs. Once they reach home, they regurgitate (throw up) the mixture from their honey sacs. After one bee regurgitates the mixture, another bee sucks it up, adds her saliva, and regurgitates it again. Repeatedly, nectar is transformed into honey. Honey and pollen are the main diets of young bees (called larvae).
 
3     For as long as 9,000 years, humans have depended on bees for honey and other bee products (such as bee wax and bee pollen). In modern societies, bee farmers build hives to house bee colonies. Each bee colony contains one queen, hundreds of drones (male bees), and thousands of worker bees. The queen is responsible for nothing but mating and laying eggs. Drones' only job is to mate with the queen. Worker bees, daughters of the queen, need to do everything else - collecting nectar and pollen, guarding their colonies, and caring for larvae.
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