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Hose in hand, I turn to water the autumn joy sedum, covered in frilly mounds of that gorgeous faded-brick pink. Every single blossom is serving as a dance floor for a bee. They hover, spin, dip, and suck nectar, which they will hold in their “honey stomach” (I want one of those) until they can use the energy to make, like British butlers, royal jelly or wax. But how did they know which flowers would entertain them?
They have known for seventy million years. At least, that is how long plants and their pollinators have been evolving together. For bees and their kin, the relationship is all about the nectar. For plants, offering a little sugar guarantees pollination, so they can live on and spread. Bees have short little lives and emerge naïve, so the flowers swiftly initiate them in the art of desire—and its fulfillment.
Foxgloves, for example, ooze extra nectar at the bottom of their column of blooms. That causes a bee to start low and work its way up, which is exactly how the foxglove wants the bee to proceed, because its bottom blooms are ready to be pollinated and make little seed pods. By the time the bee reaches the top, it is no longer bringing pollen but instead gathering up this particular flower’s pollen to carry it somewhere else.
Other flowers have their own tricks. Bright petals for visibility, red and orange for hummingbirds, blue petals on the bird’s-foot violet to attract bees that see ultraviolet light. White flowers that glow in the moonlight, heavy with fragrance, a siren call for nocturnal pollinators like bats and moths. But color, or its absence, seems almost crude when you learn the subtler lures.
Lemons offer caffeine to sharpen a bee’s memory. Essential oils and volatile compounds act like sexy French perfume. Petals are shaped to make sure that warmth is held in the flower’s center. Like gymnasts, bees need to warm up before they can fly through the air. They can flutter their wings, but how much nicer, to seek out the heat on offer in exactly the place the flower wants them to land. What is it the feds call this sort of con, a honeypot?
A similar crime of nature is entrapment: some plants have an escape hatch that allows pollen-laden gnats to fly away and visit other plants. After a while of this R&R, the hatch vanishes, trapping the gnats inside the plant so their pollen can be used for fertilization.
Then there is disguise: both copper beard and hammer orchids have managed to imitate the scent and form of female wasps, luring males to mate with them, then flipping the males upside down and onto the stigma, where the pollen is transferred.
Rest assured, other structures are as innocent as ingenues, like the native azalea whose shape seems custom designed for the ruby-throated hummingbird. The American lotus flower can reach a whopping thirteen inches in diameter, providing a landing pad for beetles, who are a little clumsier in takeoff and landing than other insects. The white and yellow vein pattern on Iris missouriensis, the western blue flag iris, is a nectar guide, steering a bumblebee down between the sepal and the style arm. The style arm is a modified pistil (the flower’s female reproductive part) that connects the stigmatic lip to the ovary. As the bee crawls toward the nectar glands, pollen rubs off its back and clings to the sticky stigmatic lip.
A cigarette, anyone? Ah, but we are not yet done. Consider the bottle gentian wildflower, whose shape seems impossible to pollinate. A bumblebee comes to the top of the flower, forcibly spreads the corolla open, and enters the flower completely. I am cribbing from the USDA guide to wildflower pollination, not Oscar Wilde’s Yellow Book.
Flowers use protection, too. Mints have long nectar spurs so their nectar will not be stolen by common robber insects but can be saved for hawkmoths, butterflies, and hummingbirds, all of whom have either a long proboscis or a long, skinny bill.
The showiest, blowsiest, Bette Midler flowers are the ones desperate to elbow aside the competition. All those dramatic irises, with their huge painterly blooms? They want the bumblebees’ attention. And they are ballsy, with giant rhizomes storing energy for their display. Iris leaves can absorb sunlight from top and bottom, and they are positioned to soak up as many rays as possible.
For us, a blossom is something to be coaxed, or bought at Trader Joe’s on impulse. But blossoms are not for us. They are for the bees—and the beetles, and the butterflies and hummingbirds. You thought plants flowered at different times so your garden would always have visual interest? The schedule is meant to decrease competition, so the pollinators all have a constant supply of food.
Eighty percent of all pollination happens in this plant-and-animal dance, with only twenty percent cast to the winds or water. And animals have reinvented themselves for the relationship, too. The black and white ruffed lemur evolved fur on its face—as did nectar-feeding bats—so the pollen sticks and can be easily transported.
Shakespeare knew how flowers could deceive and seduce. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he wrote of “a little western flower,/ Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,” and nicknamed “love-in-idleness.” “The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid/ Will make a man or woman madly dote/ Upon the next live creature that it sees.”
Imagine what it could do to a bumblebee.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
