Pollinators: Bee's Foot
This post includes the second of the six paintings completed under a grant from the Haines & Friends Fund 2015 Artist Grants. Hitch a ride on a bee’s hairy foot and visit the land of an elderberry leaf. There you can explore the leaf’s breathing pores (stomata) through which the leaf inhales carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen and water vapor in its daily work of photosynthesis.
Bee's Foot
Bees, like all insects, have 3 pairs of jointed legs. At the very end of each leg is the last tarsal joint with a pair of bi-lobed claws and a single rounded lobe called the empodium. When the bee walks on an ordinarily rough surface, it walks on its claws. But when the surface is slippery, the bee flattens its empodia, secretes a sticky substance onto them, and walks on them instead of the claws. The colorless secretion also acts as a pheromone that leaves a chemical footprint with messages for the other bees of her hive.
The bee’s legs are covered in numerous hairs of varying lengths. Pollen grains catch in these hairs and get carried from flower to flower as the bee forages for nectar. With a pollen comb on her front leg, she gathers the pollen that has caught on her body and transfers the grains into a “pollen basket” on her rear legs. She does not eat the indigestible "raw" pollen right away, but unloads it at the hive, where other bees work it into highly digestible and protein-rich “bee bread.”
The surface of every leaf has pores (stomata) that regulate the passage of carbon dioxide, oxygen and water vapor into or out of the leaf for photosynthesis, respiration and transpiration. A leaf can have between 100 to 1000 stomata per square millimeter, each with its pair of guard cells that regulate the size of the opening.