I thought I was pretty clever in my previous post Honeybee Doesnt Fit But Hummingbird Has No Problem, noticing that a honeybee couldn’t get into the flower that hummingbirds seemed designed for.

But something was bothering me …

The agastache plants are in my front yard, so I walk past them every day. And every day, I saw honeybees buzzing around them, landing on them, crawling all over the flowers.

Honeybees aren’t stupid. They wouldn’t waste their time by flocking to plants that aren’t going to give them a reward. I still think the bee from the previous post was young and frustrated, and not successful in getting nectar. But I was missing something.

So I looked closer.

The first thing I noticed on my second look was that it wasn’t just honeybees that were visiting the agastache plants — bumblebees were frequenting them, too.

This bumblebee has her whole head inside the flower! So obviously, I was wrong, right off the bat. If a big bumblebee could fit in, the much smaller honeybee should fit. The honeybee from last week just hadn’t figured out the right technique yet.

And the bumblebees were going after nectar — if you look closely, you’ll see that the bumble above has her tongue in the flower. But while the bumblebee is slurping up nectar, she’s getting dusted with pollen, in this case, all over her face.

And bumblebees, at least, are powerful enough to rip the flowers to get deeper into them! They need to because that’s still a very long tube they have to stretch down to get the sweetest nectar. Hummingbirds still have them beat in that regard.

And hey! Would you look at that? While the bumblebee is focused on the nectar, she’s getting tickled by a long light purple stamen stretching up from another flower in the lower left. The stamens are the part of the plant flower that picks up pollen that the bee has accumulated and transported. From the plant’s point of view, this is the whole point of inviting pollinators to visit — pollinators moving pollen to different plants for the plants to pick up. So, success!

And here we are back with a honeybee. Can she get the sweet nectar?

Yes! Score!

She may not get to the base of the flower like a hummingbird does, but she gets enough to make it worth her while.

She gets her nectar and some pollen, the plant gets pollen moved! The system works! Yay!