Flowers lure pollinating bees, says study
Flowers lure pollinating bees, says study bumblebees were drawn to synthetic flowers designed to generate the same kind of ultraviolet rings, Hundreds of flower species have evolved the ability to project ethereal halos of blue light invisible to humans in order to lure pollinating bees, researchers have found. In laboratory experiments, bumblebees were drawn to synthetic flowers designed to generate the same kind of ultraviolet rings, they reported in the journal Nature. “The effect occurs in the ultraviolet part of the optical spectrum that we cannot see,” said co-author Ullrich Steiner, a researcher at the Adolphe Merkle Institute in Fribourg, Switzerland. “But bees can.” Researchers were surprised by the results. To start with, the nano-scale plant architecture — arranged like packets of dry spaghetti — producing these blue halos appears haphazard, and varies significantly from flower to flower. “We had always assumed that the disorder we saw in our petal surfaces was just an acc