To answer Beekeeperc's question as set, assuming no prior knowledge : bees
gather nectar and pollen for their own food, YES, and the plant invests
energy in producing nectar solely in order to attract insects to visit the
flower, so it is freely on offer BUT the plant is not stupid and has a
cunning plan. Plants are rooted in the earth (and so cannot move about) BUT
reproduction requires the admixing of the female and male elements from
different flowers. Some plants use the wind, but they have to produce
enormous quanties of very light pollen grains as where the pollen will be
carried to is entirely random and the chance any grain will hit the female
element in a flower on another plant of the same species is extremely low -
a grain of spruce pollen weighs 1/500,000 gm (1gm <1/16 oz). SO another
group of plants have chosen to develop a mutually beneficial relationship
with insects - they offer the insect free food BUT in a way that will result
in some pollen being carried directly to the flower on another plant of the
same species - a much more targetted approach.  So these plants produce tiny
quantities of nectar (but need produce far fewer pollen grains), and
position the nectaries so that an insect cannot avoid brushing against the
pollen-producing parts of the flower when sucking up the nectar.  The pollen
grains are sticky so they stick to the insect's body hair.  Honeybees brush
up most of the pollen and pack it for transport as small balls (of no
further use to the flower) but some remains that gets carried into the next
flower the bee visits - the nectar in each flower is so little that a bee
may visit thousands before it has a full load. Insect-carried pollen grains
can be larger and heavier than wind-blown pollen (up to 1/14,000 gm) and so
more effective - larger barbs for more efficient locking on, for example.

So do bees make flowers larger, healthier, stronger? - no. The flowers get
knocked about if anything - some heavy wild bees vibrate their bodies when
settled in say a rose flower, to shake the pollen onto their bodies.  Once
pollinated, the petals will die and energy goes into developing the seed or
fruit - unpollinated blossoms last longer.    But there will be more seeds
and better developed fruit if a flower has been fully pollinated - some
plants produce separate single seeds from florets, more of which will get
pollinated so more seeds.  Fruit such as apples have segments each with
seeds - many visits by bees to the sasme flower are needed if all segments
of the fruit are to develop and the apple be perfectly round.  Whether more
seeds will result in more (wild) flowers depends on how u look after the
soil.  Wild flowers usually need poor soil - top growth should be removed
when flowering is over, and the soil lightly raked to break the top pan and
create crevices into which seeds can fall.  There are many books on wild
gardening - I find Johnathan Andrews, Crating a Wild Flower Garden, 1986
(156 pages) one of the clearest - it re-uses the illustrations from Edith
Holden, The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, 1906 - facsimile reprint
1977 (178 pages)  - itself a delight.

Honeybees are not the only pollinators however.  A study in 1929 found as
many wild bees as honeybees visited Cherries, but six times as many
honeybees than wild bees visited apples.  Some plants such as evening
primrose aim to attract moths.  Of course there were far more wild bees 80
years ago, before commercial farming damaged the environment so much.  Some
wild bees are said to far more effective pollinators than honeybees, for
example osmia rufa, which are now commercially available in UK as
alternative pollinators for orchards.  These bees live only a few weeks when
the fruit is out and collect pollen in great quanties rather than nectar as
they lay eggs on balls of pollen and die, leaving the larvae to fend for
themselves until they emerge next spring - they therefore do not have to be
kept alive with artificial feeds after the honey flow.

Interesting specialised books are: Herbert Mace, Bees Flowers and Fruit,
1949 (178 pages) and Sir John Lubbock, British Wild Flowers in Relation to
Insects, 1875 (179 pages - full of drawings of different flower forms)
Robin Dartington

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