What do bees do with pollen and nectar anyway?

While watching some bees lately on our pansies, it occurred to me that I don't really understand the whole bee/pollen/honey process. I had some indistinct notion that bees collect both pollen and nectar, but how? why? I realized that I didn't have a clue. A job for Google...
A good, simple explanation of what bees do can be found on the Sciencing website, and The Buzz About Bees is another good source which does not get too detailed, as is the Terminix website.
Essentially, worker bees, whose job it is to collect food for the colony, visit flowers, attracted by the sugar-rich nectar that flowers produce for that very reason and by brightly-coloured petals (including colours into the ultra-violet spectrum that we cannot see). They drink down the sweet, liquid nectar from each flower they visit, using some for their own immediate energy needs, and storing the rest in a pouch-like internal structure in their stomachs called the "crop". When they get back to the hive, they regurgitate the stored nectar, which other house bees mix with enzymes and expose to the air (even fanning it with their wings to help the evaporation process) in order to create honey. This honey, which stores much better and longer than the raw nectar, is stored within the cells of the honeycomb of the hive, and protected with a wax cap. Honey and nectar, then, are the main carbohydrate and energy sources for the bees of the colony.
While collecting the nectar, the bees also collect protein- and fat-rich pollen from the flowers they visit, which sticks to their hairy legs (or some species collect it quite deliberately in special sacks called "pollen baskets"). Pollen is a powdery substance that contains the male genetic material of flowering plants and, as the bees move from one flower to another of the same species, some pollen rubs off and is used to pollinate the plants (i.e. it starts the process of producing fruits and seeds, which allows for the development of new generations of the plants).
However, this is merely an incidental occurrence as far as the bees are concerned, intent as they are on providing food for their colony. The returning worker bees deposit their collected pollen at the hive, where it is mixed with water and nectar to produce a protein-rich substance known as "bee bread", a less perishable and more easily-digestible product which is reserved for the fast-growing young larvae, which require much more protein than the adults. This bee bread is also stored in the honeycombs and allocated to the larvae as needed.
Of course, there's a lot more to it than that. For example, there is "royal jelly", a white secretion produced by young female worker bees, that is fed to young larvae during the first few days of their development, and to a few special larvae that are selected to become future queens thoughout their development, so that they grow extra-quickly and become twice the size of ordinary bees. Also, not all species of bees produce honey, only the social species that live in colonies. Most bee species are actually solitary and, instead of making honey, they just collect pollen and nectar and mix them together to produce a "pollen loaf", which provides all the food needed for one egg.
But, as a quick simplistic summary: bees collect nectar for energy food and to make honey (which is a longer-term stored food for the colony), and they collect pollen for a more protein-rich food source for the young larvae of the colony.