One more Valentine cartoon! If you are not familiar with orchid strategies of fooling pollinators, look at my previous post where I wrote a few words about this.
Tag: valentines day
-
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Today is a good day for a story about love. As you might know, some orchid species use males of bees or other insects as pollinators, making them think that their flowers are females ready to mate. They mimic pheromones of a given species, so the relationship is often very tight – there is only one insect species pollinating a given species of orchid. The plant has to be a real master of mimicry because the bee must be fooled more than once – only that way a transfer of pollen between individual flowers can occur. And it really is the case – it has been shown that for male Colletes cunicularius, a common European spring bee, that they prefer scent of the orchid, Ophrys exaltata, than of their own females!
If you want to read the original study about these Colletes males, here is the reference: Vereecken, N. J., & Schiestl, F. P. (2008). The evolution of imperfect floral mimicry. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(21), 7484-7488.
Non-honey bees 