Post 5: Pollinator for a Day

There have been so few insects that humans have to step in to ensure pollination. Apples and plums, raspberries, squash and blueberries, and many more, need it to produce good fruit.

How much pollen do you collect?

Here you have brushes, and around the room there are bowls of pollen. There is also a scale to measure the amount of pollen. Your task is to be pollinators, not for a whole day, of course, but for two minutes. The task is to collect as much pollen as possible in those two minutes.

Here are the rules (and no cheating!):

  • Set a stopwatch on your phone for two minutes.
  • Place the collecting bowl on the scale and press “ON” or “TARE”, so that the scale shows 0.00 with the bowl on. (If necessary, weigh the bowl, note what it weighed and subtract the correct number of grams from the total weight at the end.)
  • The bowls should not be moved, and you may only collect pollen using the brushes. 
  • Pollen that falls off along the way from bowl to bowl cannot be weighed.

When 2 minutes have passed, record how many grams you have managed to collect here .

Did you know that:

Pollen is important bee food

Bees and bumblebees visit flowers to collect pollen and nectar. Pollen is collected in pollen baskets on their legs. Many insects get pollen on them when they visit flowers, and it is this pollen, which sits on the hairs and falls off a little here and there, that causes the plants to be pollinated. Beetles, flies and butterflies are also pollinators .

The bees fly for miles

A honeybee can carry up to 35% of its own body weight in pollen. A honeybee weighs about 0.1 grams, and can then carry 0.035 grams of pollen on one trip. It takes about 29 trips to collect 1 gram of pollen. A trip is as long as it needs to be to find food, but can easily be 2-3 km. That 's 60 miles to collect 1 gram of pollen! If a person weighing 75 kg were to carry 35% of their body weight , that would be about 26 kg. And one gram of pollen would then correspond to us carrying a total of about 760 kg, or 26 kg for 60 miles. That's a solid backpack and a solid trip, that !

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