Life Cycle_ The Honeybee _ Flowers

Hi, I'm Jared. Welcome to Fun Science Demos. Who does not love to bite into a nice juicy apple? But why are we here with peaches and tomatoes and peppers and strawberries and apples next to a beehive with smoke billowing and blowing? Well, it is the big idea today. The big idea today is that without bees, we would not have a lot of the different foods we eat. And without Wendy, we would not have this really cool beehive to take a closer look at. So before we get to why bees are so important for the food we eat, let's take a closer look at the parts of a bee. So instead of me holding an actual live bee and getting stung, I have this bigger model of a bee. Now, the first thing to keep in mind is that bees are insects. Well, what makes them an insect? Well, they have three parts to their body. They have three body parts. They have a head, a thorax, and an abdomen. They also have wings and antennae. And then they have six legs, three on each side. One, two, three, four, five, six. The honeybee as the insect. Now, the parts of the bee are interesting, but take a look at what they make. These bees actually make honey. We can eat honey, but where does that honey come from? That honey comes from the bees visiting flowers. What kind of flowers? Well, flowers from the peach tree, flowers from the strawberry plant, flowers from the tomato plant, flowers from the pepper plant, flowers from the apple tree. So many different flowers. As the bees visit the flowers, they get the ingredients needed to make honey and we get fruit. So bees use flowers to make honey. But how do bees find all those different flowers? Well, believe it or not, bees actually communicate. People communicate by talking and pointing and things like that. Well, bees don't talk. They communicate through smelling and, believe it or not, dancing. When one bee finds a flower, she actually comes back to the hive and does a little dance to tell them where the flower is. That dance is called the waggle dance because the bee waggles. Once that bee waggles, all the other bees fly out to find that flower. They visit the flower, get the nectar, and bring that nectar back to the hive where they make honey. So bees love to visit flowers, and they take the nectar from the flower to take it back to the hive to make honey. Why is that so important to us and to flowers and plants? So when a bee visits a flower, it actually takes the pollen from the plant and moves it to meet the egg of the plant where a new seed is made. That new seed makes a new plant, and the whole life cycle of plants happens again and again and again. And that flower actually becomes fruit. A lot of our fruits and vegetables and most of our wildflowers are pollinated by bees. We would like to thank Wendy and her bees for giving us this awesome tour that shows us how important bees are to the fruits, vegetables, and food we eat. All this talk about honey and fruit has me a little bit hungry, so I think I am going to try a little bit. Sweet. Science is so sweet. Thanks for watching.