Blanket – Corbiculae – Flower

!gaillardia-w-honeybee-&-pollen-sacs
Honeybees, bumblebees, stingless bees, and orchid bees have corbicula (corbiculae is plural), commonly called pollen baskets or pollen sacs. Corbiculae are specialized ‘containers’ on the outside of the hind legs. Bees transfer pollen from their bodies to a comb on their hind legs, compact it, and then press it into their corbiculae.

Look at all of the pollen that the honeybee — pictured above — on the blanket flower (Gaillardia pulchella) has collected. Below is a happy honeybee on beach dune sunflower (Helianthus debilis) …
!helianthus-w-bee-&-corbicula

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