An inadequately pollinated plant will yield small and misshapen fruit, unacceptable at the supermarket. Reitveld's Farm in Bourbonnais, Illinois purchased ten hives four years ago to pollinate their melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. Without the bees, Rhonda Reitveld said, they'd have ten blossoms per plant. With the bees, they get 40, dramatically increasing their yield. To the bee, that field of honeydew or watermelon is a landscape in shades of gray, each blossom a burst of radiant ultraviolet color.
Bees see primarily the blues in the short end of the color spectrum.
They are completely blind to red, and greens appear gray. The eye of the bee is made up of thousands of tiny light receptors, each eight-petaled, like a lotus, with light penetrating its center. The perception of light and color therefore is multi-faceted, enabling the bee to read angles of sunlight like a roadmap, and effectively communicate, through dance, the location of great fields of nectar and pollen to the rest of the hive. Propolis During the last part of her life, a worker bee stops gathering nectar and pollen and instead gathers tree saps and resinous substances from buds, leafy stalks and the twigs of young trees. This she mixes with bee secretions to make propolis, which a younger worker will use to coat many surfaces in the hive, protecting it from infection.