Why do bees/pollinators pollinate other plants?
Why do bees/pollinators pollinate other plants?
From my understanding: I get that for honeybees, they need the nectar to make honey (their energy food source) and the pollen is an additional, essential food source for them which contains protein. They collect both nectar and pollen from flowers. For other pollinators like wasps, they don't make honey but they still need to eat nectar and pollen which they collect from flowers. Though these pollinators benefit (survive/thrive) by collecting nectar and pollen from flowers, they also help plants to reproduce by carrying pollen between them and depositing it.
But why do they transfer pollen to other flowering plants? Of course this allows certain plants to reproduce, but that doesn't explain why these pollinators care about helping plants reproduce. Are they little plant farmers who actually realise that transferring pollen and therefore making more plants, would benefit them? That would seem to demonstrate pretty high-level intelligence and foresight, planning wouldn't it? Or is it just incidental that they're going between flowers collecting nectar and pollen and happen to drop some pollen from previous flowers along the way?
I really struggled to find any information on the "WHY" of what bees are doing, from their own psychology point of view.
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They aren't farming, they’re foraging, and have evolved symbiotic relationships through evolution. The plants get a benefit by getting pollinated, the bees get a benefit by having more flowers to feed on.
Since they need pollen, bees who developed those little hairs are/were able to out-compete bees who didn’t have them. They're able to carry a lot more pollen and incidentally transfer it, spreading it around, so the new bees are better pollinators. That helps plants produce a lot more flowers, so it’s truly a symbiotic relationship- one would not exist without the other. Since wasps are omnivores, the evolutionary pressure to specialize isn't as strong.
IIrc, there are some wasps who have specialized relationships with certain plants and flowers too, driven by evolution- the flowers depend on the wasps, and the wasps depend on the flowers.
Re: wasps, some orchids grow petals that look like a wasp's ass to trigger attempts at mating.