Proboscis, pollen, and the rapture of interspecies intimacy | Hacker News Reader

Proboscis, pollen, and the rapture of interspecies intimacy

worldsensorium.com

32 pointsdnetesn7 comments

I caught a bumblebee rolling around in a big red rose once. You'd think the creature was normally down to business, flitting from flower to flower, dutifully pollenating. I've no other way to describe it, this one was rolling around in that rose like a wire-haired terrier in stray fish guts.

Bees pollinate as a side effect of their travels, which are (from the bee’s PoV), intended to collect the energy-rich pollen so the hive can make food.

I assume it was trying to collect as much pollen as possible via its hairy body.

This is why those same flowers turn into yummy fruit, so other (like us) will eat them and drop or excrete the seeds elsewhere.

They have also been shown to (probably) play for no purpose at all: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000334722...

Nice!

Very blathery, seems to have been written by an artist rather than a scientist.

Relevant part is this "One place to start [assisting pollination] is finding opportunities to encourage and facilitate the relationships between plants and their endemic pollinator partners. To that end, The Pollinator Partnership has developed a comprehensive series of free planting guides tailored to the swathe of individual ecoregions found throughout the US and Canada. To access these guides, you simply enter your postal code into their system and it will generate the corresponding document containing specific recommendations and practices to help you support plant-pollinator partnerships in your immediate area."

While I agree it was likely written by someone with creative tendencies, I quite enjoyed their writing style, it's tone made me smile, appreciate nature a bit, and proceed to the guide. As someone who spends far too much time reading arxiv posts on this site, it is sometimes nice to have a change of pace, furthermore, nearly all of the articles I've seen on this website thus far appear to be well-written.

A whole article on this topic without the word “symbiosis”?

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