On the hind legs of bees are found slight concavities, just like spoons, surrounded by a fringe of hairs. This area is known as the "pollen basket," and serves to carry the pollen. The underside of the bees' abdomen is completely covered in soft hairs. The pollen sticks to these when the worker bee encounters a flower, and the hairs on its legs act rather like a comb, sweeping up the pollen and helping accumulate it in the pollen basket.30

The Keys of the heavens and Earth belong to Him. He expands the provision of anyone He wills or restricts it. He has knowledge of all things. (Surat ash-Shura: 12)

When a bee reaches the age for food gathering, it fills its crop with a small amount of honey to give it enough energy before flying off. In addition, it uses this honey to place in its baskets the pollen it collects. When the pollen-gathering bee lands on a flower's anther, it uses its mouth and forelegs to scrape up the pollen it finds there and moistens it with the regurgitated honey in order to make it sticky. As the bee does so, some of the pollen sticks to its body hairs, so that bees sometimes appear as if they were covered in flour.

Bees sweep up this pollen into their pollen baskets while in flight. As they fly from one flower to another, they use the combs on their hind legs to collect the pollen stuck to their legs and bodies. By rubbing its hind legs against each other, a bee transfers the pollen gathered on each pollen comb to the pollen press on the opposing leg. The accumulated pollen is then forced into the pollen basket on the outer part of the leg. The pollen is thus collected in one place, and the bee continues doing this until, eventually, a large deposit of pollen forms, and the basket is filled. The bee occasionally strikes the outer surface of the basket with its legs in order to keep the pollen mass from falling off, thus settling it safely, and heads off back toward the hive. On arriving, the pollen is placed in cells specially set aside for it.31

Bees use the special systems created by God in their hind legs to carry pollen. 1 – The bee scrapes the pollen collected on the combs, using its pollen rakes. 2 – The pollen is then pushed towards the pollen basket by pumping the legs. 3 – Finally the pollen, moistened with a quantity of regurgitated honey, is transported back to the nest.

Many insects collect pollen from flowers, but none achieve such productive results as bees, because their bodies are so ideally suited to pollen gathering. Even so, it requires considerable work, because after working for a very long time, the bee carries only two pollen packets back to the hive. It takes an average of 20 pairs of pollen packages to fill one honeycomb cell. This means the bees must work non-stop.32

From flowers, bees collect two distinct substances that are each very different to one another, both in terms of their contents, their manner of collection and where they are used. Bees need a different system to collect nectar from flowers from what they use for collecting pollen. That is because the location of nectar varies according to the plant's structure. In some plants, the nectar appears freely on the surface of the petals, and it is no problems for bees to reach it. In the flowers of other species, however, the nectar is much less accessible, being at the bottom of a long tube. Bees therefore need to be able to descend deep to retrieve the nectar from those regions.

Thanks to their flawless bodily structures, bees can easily collect nectar from the depths of flowers that other insects cannot reach. God has created bees together with features ideally suited to their duties.

This represents a difficulty for a great many insect species, though not for bees, since they have a special organ known as the proboscis-an elongated tubular mouthpart that allows them to reach nectar in the depths of a flower. They also use their proboscis to drink honey and water. The proboscis plays a vital role in exchanging foodstuffs among bees, and is also used in licking up the secretions from the queen bee and distributing them to the other bees. When not using its proboscis, a worker folds it up in a Z-shaped pattern into a cavity beneath its mouth, and then opens it out again when she wants to collect nectar, pollen or water.33

The worker proboscis can very in length from 5.3 to 7.2 millimeters (0.2087 to 0.2835 inches), depending on the race. The nectar of some flowers lies deeper down than in others. It’s thus a major advantage for bees to possess a long proboscis ideally suited to extracting nectar from the base of such flowers. The pictures at the top show the bee’s proboscis in extended and folded positions. As can be seen below, bees fold their proboscis inwards in a Z-shaped pattern when not in use.

When a bee lands on a flower, drops of nectar flow first up this sucking tube, and then through the esophagus into the "honey stomach." Bees collect as much nectar as they can carry there, then return to the hive. They need to visit between 100 and 150 flowers in order to fill their honey stomachs of 50 cubic millimeter capacity.34

The division of labor among bees is clearly dramatized in their collection and storage of nectar. A bee returning to the hive laden with nectar wastes no time in storing it away. Instead, it transfers the nectar from its mouth to those bees charged with that responsibility, leaving only enough in its stomach to meet its own energy needs, then flies off again at once to the food source. Any bee to which the nectar has been transferred either gives it to still other bees or else stores it away, depending on the food needs of the hive on the day in question.35

He is God—the Creator, the Maker, the Giver of Form. To Him belong the Most Beautiful Names. Everything in the heavens and earth glorifies Him. He is the Almighty, the All-Wise. (Surat al-Hashr: 24)

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• 30.Karl von Frisch, Arilarin Hayati (The Life of Bees), pp.36-37
• 31.Mark L. Winston, The Biology of the Honey Bee, pp.25-26
• 32.Ali Demirsoy, Yasamin Temel Kurallari, Omurgasizlar/Bocekler (The Basic Rules of Life, Invertebrates/Insects), Entomology Vol. 2, p.677
• 33. Mark L. Winston, The Biology of the Honey Bee, pp.19-20.
• 34. Ali Demirsoy, Yasamin Temel Kurallari, Omurgasizlar/Bocekler (The Basic Rules of Life, Invertebrates/Insects), Entomology Vol. 2, p.676.