Can you imagine what it must be like to have six legs? I can't. I literally cannot.
I have a pretty good imagination, and a pretty good sense of empathy. It's easy for me to imagine being a four-legged animal, for example, or a bird (because who can't imagine flapping our arms and flying?) I can even imagine how it would be to have a tail like a cat's to counterbalance movements.
But being a bee? They have one pair of feelers (antennae), one pair of multi-functional front legs, two pairs of walking-only legs . . . and also two pairs of wings. Unlike our four appendages, they have twelve. Somehow, even with tiny brains, they can make them all work yet still have enough brainpower left over for complex social activity and navigation. Amazing.
As a kid, I assumed insects like bees and houseflies managed to land on walls and ceilings with some sort of glue or suction cups, and dreamed of having something similar. Luckily, my attempts at inventing something similar didn't do (much) damage to me or the walls of the family home. It turns out that I was going about it mostly all wrong.
It's true that bees, like houseflies and many other insects, can exude a sticky substance from their hairy footpads to help them walk on especially slick surfaces. But that's on exceptionally smooth surfaces, like glass; most of the time they don't need to do that. What they do on hard surfaces is exactly what a human wall walker would do: find cracks, crevices, pits, and hollows that will make a decent toehold. Except, of course, bees don't exactly have toes; at the ends of their legs they have pointed claws that can find a foothold on microscopic irregularities. On flexible things like leaves and people, these tarsal claws can hook and hold like miniature cat claws.
If you look at almost any surface with a well-lit microscope, you'll likely see that most have a wealth of toeholds that would hold you . . . if your toes were pointed and you were the size and weight of a bee.
We all have our blind spots. Bees are no different.
We can never actually see our own backs, only reflections in a mirror or a photo. Even weirder, there's a part of our backs that most of us have never even touched, making it the perfect place for some joker to tape a “kick me” sign without us knowing.
Bees have a similar spot, and nature often sticks a sort of “kick me” sign right on it.
Bees are incredibly clean insects, as befits their job as food handlers. It is not just their aloofness that gives them the reputation of being the cats of the insect world, but their continuous self-grooming. They use their front and middle legs as brushes to remove the pollen dust that's a constant in their work environment. Their front legs even come with a specialized notch that in placement, size, and shape appears to have only one function, described by its name: the “antenna cleaner.”
Given all that, it's almost comical to sometimes see nature's kick-me sign on the back of incoming bees. Just above their middle pair of legs, in a spot they can neither see nor reach, they sport a bright white, yellow, orange, or red streak. It's pollen from the flowers they've visited, making the bees look like a family of tiny flying technicolor skunks. They'd be so embarrassed if they knew.
A big reason that bees make great pollinators is that their fuzz has an electrostatic charge. They get that static electricity from rubbing up against other bees in the same way you get it from petting cats or rubbing a balloon on your head. As a result, they get covered from head to tail with pollen that they unwittingly spread from flower to flower. What happens to the pollen they brush off themselves after visiting multiple flowers? It doesn't go to waste—they stuff it into “pollen baskets” on their legs and carry it back to the hive for the larvae to eat.