Quotes About Pollination

No beehive. Beehives - we sort of put them - well, we revive them sometimes.

It is hard to imagine a world without bees. It would be even harder to live in it.

Everyone should have two or three hives of bees.

Cactus finches do more with cactus than Plains Indians did with buffalo. They nest in cactus; they sleep in cactus; they often copulate in cactus; they drink cactus nectar; they eat cactus flowers, cactus pollen, and cactus seeds. In return they pollinate the cactus, like bees.

People say if bees die out, the world would end, apparently. Now, I don't know if that's true, if that's some bee enthusiast who managed to write a good document, and people believe this.

Bees sip honey from flowers and hum their thanks when they leave. The gaudy butterfly is sure that the flowers owe thanks to him.

Social entrepreneurship is like a butterfly, sucking honey from a flower, but the flower won't die. They're helping the flower to make pollination.

I can't pick a favorite animal; I love so many! But I guess if I have to choose, I pick bees! There's this brilliant documentary called 'Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?' I think it's important for people to be educated about bees - they pollinate almost all the food we eat. They are amazing!

Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.

In flight a bumblebee flaps its wings 200 times per second (which equals 12,000 rpm), roughly equivalent to the speed of a high-revving motorbike engine.

But on the other hand, there is no doubt that honeybees are a non-native species. It also seems to me common sense that flowers can produce only so much nectar, and that there can therefore be only so many bees in a particular habitat. Something has to give, and that thing is likely to be the local flower-visiting insects.

This worked pretty well; the nests in gardens tended to grow much more quickly and become heavier than those on farms, presumably because they have more flowers.

James caught and measured the size of hundreds of wild, foraging buff-tails in and around Southampton, and found that the average size and tongue length varied greatly depending on which flower he caught them on.

In 1987 De Jonghe founded the company Biobest, which remains today one of the largest commercial producers of bumblebees. In 1988 they produced enough bumblebees to pollinate just forty hectares of tomatoes. By the following year they were exporting to Holland, France and the UK. Others wanted in on the action; the Dutch company Koppert Biological Systems began rearing bumblebees in 1988, followed by Bunting Brinkman Bees, also Dutch, in 1989.

Most of the rare species seemed to be very fond of clover, particularly red clover, and other wild legumes such as tufted vetch and bird's-foot trefoil, probably because these plants provide pollen that is unusually rich in protein.

Many bees evolved longer and longer tongues to make it easier for them to reach nectar hidden within flowers; some now have tongues longer than their bodies.fn1

It is the threat of extinction of large mammals such as tigers or rhinoceros that tends to capture the public's attention, but arguably it is the loss of the smaller creatures that should give us most concern. Insects are responsible for delivering numerous 'ecosystem services' such as pollination and decomposition, and there is no doubt that little life on earth (including ourselves) could survive without them.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Fig trees and fig wasps share an intimate cooperative relationship. The fig that you eat is not really a fruit. There is a tiny hole at the end, and if you go into this hole (you'd have to be as small as a fig wasp to do so, and they are minute: thankfully too small to notice when you eat a fig), you find hundreds of tiny flowers lining the walls. The fig is a dark indoor hothouse for flowers, an indoor pollination chamber. And the only agents that can do the pollinating are fig wasps.

If the bees disappear, man would have only four years of life left.

From Indian vultures to Chinese bees, Nature provides the 'natural services' that keep the economy going

To make a prairie it takes clover and one bee one clover and a bee and revery The revery alone will do if bees are few.

He also points out the butterflies and bees, the pollinators with wagging tongues, spreading rumors from one plant to another.

MILES BELOW and three centuries earlier, a pollen-coated wasp crawled down the hole at the tip of a certain green fig and laid eggs all over the involute garden of flowers hidden inside. Each of the world's seven hundred and fifty species of Ficus has its own unique wasp tailored to fertilize it. And this one wasp somehow found the precise fig species of her destiny. The foundress laid her eggs and died. The fruit that she fertilized became her tomb.