Bees gather pollen

Virgil, a Roman poet writing fifty years before the Christian era, uses poetry to educate his readers about working the land. He discusses how to lay out a vineyard.  

                              Make sure the [rows] run parallel

             and still maintain right angles with the boundary lines.

He advocates crop rotation. 

While your land gets a chance to rest by changing crops

    don’t think that all the while your fallow isn’t earning a return.

Virgin devotes an entire book, 568 lines of poetry, to the habits and proper care of honeybees.  He describes foraging bees as :

youngsters who haul themselves back home exhausted

                        
leg baskets loaded down with thyme.

The “thyme” carried in “leg baskets” is not the actual herb, but pollen from the herb’s flowers.  During a gathering journey, a bee moves among many flowers of the same species. An herb such as thyme is a favorite.  On her rounds, she (since all worker bees are females) carries pollen from one thyme plant to the next.  

Pollen, sticky and bright-colored, is a plant’s equivalent to semen.  It clings to hairs on the bee’s back and legs.  Some pollen brushes off as she dives into each new blossom in search of nectar.  The flower uses the captured pollen to begin a process of pollination and setting seed.

But not all pollen stays behind in the field.  Surplus amounts remain on the forager’s legs.  When she returns to the hive, these grains are removed by other worker bees and stored in wax cells as food for newly hatched brood.