Pollination

How pollination works, who does it, what is going wrong, and what genuinely helps.

12 guides

The numbers, with their denominators attached

Around 75% of leading global food crop types benefit to some degree from animal pollination, and those crops account for roughly 35% of global food production by volume. The staples that feed most people — wheat, rice, maize — are wind- or self-pollinated and need no insects at all.

"One in three bites of food" is a compression of the first figure that moves its meaning, and it is easy to rebut — which damages the real case along with the exaggeration. The larger stake is not agricultural anyway: around 87% of wild flowering plant species depend on animal pollination.

Nectar plants explainedNectar is a payment. Understanding what the plant is buying, and how it controls the price, explains most of what flowers do and why some are useless to some bees.
Pollen plants explainedPollen is protein and it is what bee larvae are made of. A garden with abundant nectar and no pollen supports adult bees and produces no new ones.
Why flowering seasons matterBees and flowers have to be in the same place at the same time. That synchrony is being pulled apart by warming, and for specialist bees with narrow windows it is a serious problem.
Honey bees and wild beesThere are around twenty thousand bee species and only a handful make honey. Conflating the two has produced a great deal of well-meant conservation effort aimed at the one species that needs it least.
The threats facing beesBee decline is not one problem with one cause. It is a set of interacting pressures whose relative weight differs between managed honey bees and wild species — and confusing the two produces bad solutions.
How to actually help beesRanked by how much difference it makes, from the things that genuinely work down to the things that are mostly gestures. The first item on the list is not planting flowers.
How pollination worksPlants cannot move, so they pay something that can. Pollination is a transaction, and understanding it as one explains almost everything about flower shape.
Why bees matterThe case is strong enough that it does not need the exaggerated version. Here is what the evidence actually supports, with the numbers attached to their denominators.
Pollinator decline: what is actually happeningSeveral real problems get merged into one story, and the merged version points at the wrong solutions. Untangling them changes what is worth doing.
Buzz pollination explainedAround 6 to 8 per cent of flowering plants lock their pollen inside tubes that open through a single pore, and release it only to a bee that grips the flower and vibrates. Honey bees cannot do it, which is why tomatoes are pollinated by bumblebees.
Specialist bees and the plants they cannot do withoutA large minority of bee species collect pollen from one plant genus and will starve rather than switch. For them a flowery garden is not forage — it is scenery around the one thing they need.
Visiting a flower is not the same as pollinating itA bee on a flower may be pollinating it, robbing it, or doing nothing for it at all. The distinction is why 'attracts bees' on a plant label tells you almost nothing, and why visit counts are a poor measure of pollination.