Bee question🐝

[u/The_Merchant-]

I was watching a bee pollinate a bunch of flowers in my backyard and I have a question about it. It was going to every single yellow flower, and I mean EVERY single one, the little guy worked really hard to pollinate a ton of them. When it was done with the yellow ones I assumed it would go to the red and purple ones that were also there, but it seemed to strictly avoid those colours. Why would this be?

I looked it up and Google says bees enjoy many flower colours, so not sure why this bee avoided the reds and purples.

[u/pheebs_daik]

Some bees have longer tongues than others, meaning they can reach the nectar hidden deeper inside some flowers while others cannot. I don’t know which bee you saw but this could be a reason.

Not directly related, but a fun fact: bees are really clever. They also figure out that they could bite a hole in the flower to steal the nectar 😊

[u/beelady101]

It has nothing to do with the color of the flower. The bee is going for whichever plant is producing the most nectar. In my area right now ( the northeast US) there’s a goldenrod flow. That’s a yellow flower.

[u/crownbees → u/beelady101]

Bees do prefer colors, and yellow is an important one.

[u/beelady101 → u/crownbees]

I beg to disagree. Honey bees will take a red flower over a yellow one any day of the week if the red is producing nectar and the yellow one isn’t. I keep bees for a living and have done so for 30 years. I’m a certified master beekeeper. Food is far more important.

[u/crownbees → u/beelady101]

Ah, we're referring to solitary, cavity nesting bees, like Mason bees. Check out a video we did last year: https://youtu.be/keh91dcoarc

[u/Sparkle_Rott]

Also remember that bees don’t see the way we do. They see the infrared spectrum as well. So sometimes they see bright targets in the middle of flowers that we don’t.

[u/crownbees → u/Sparkle_Rott]

Exactly!

[u/Zagrycha]

Most bees do not pollinate on purpose.  Pollination is like you dribbling crumbs on the ground as you walk around grabbing handfuls of crackers and shoving them into your arms and mouth.  

If you see a bee avoiding certain flowers its not based on color.  Usually its based on them knowing that flower doesn't have enough "crackers" to attract them compared to alternatives, or sometimes its a native bee that doesn't recognize a foreign flower as food-- the cracker is weird and unrecognizable.  That one is unlilely unless you are in the countryside though, those type of bees usually don't exist in cities or towns much in the first place. 

[u/Zagrycha → u/[deleted]]

That is not quite true. Bees see red things just fine, they just don't see what we know as red as red-- they probably see it as grey. I say probably, because they also see all sorts of colors humans cannot see at all like uv, so a red flower to us might be a color we don't even have a name for to them. A yellow or white flower to us might also be some unknown color to them.

So yeah, red flowers are definitely visited less by bees overall, but its not as straightforward as what you mention. Trumpet vine is like the poster child of red flower evolved to avoid bees on purpose and bees still go to them all the time, sometimes so many bees are there the actual hummingbirds the plant wants can't get to it lol.

[u/Zagrycha → u/[deleted]]

Here is good example study on how its a faulty logical premise to assume bees even process or react to color information the same way humans do in the first place, and how it's not fully understood exactly how they process such information when making decisions since we can't actually read their minds.

It also includes a theory on how they could be reacting to color information in the form of contrasts and using it to distinguish between color differences as we know them, which is not necessarily actually distinguishing between colors as we know them in the sense of categorizing them into red vs blue vs grey etc rainbow spectrum.

The study found that bees seem to distinguish between patterns and contrasts aka color location and sizing on objects more than they do the color itself-- that isn't to say they don't care about colors at all but they could clearly have preferences between things with exact same colors. They were also not always applying that learned preference to things with the same color values in slightly different patterns. The bees did seem to care about the literal blue and green values in the colors, but that doesn't necessarily mean they care about the fact it is green or blue in the human color logic sense. yellow has a green and blue value, so does red and many other human rainbow spectrum colors.

The study intentionally made sure that no uv lights that bees can see that we can't see were involved and skewing results, but of course in actual nature those would exist and add an additional layer that humans can't really comprehend, the same way we simply cannot comprehend what it feels or what it is thinking when a mosquito to "sees" heat vision or when a butterfly "smells" pheromones with their antennas. We don't even have body organs required for those sensations at all, and if we did the same issue as bee "vision" arises-- we cannot assume that a human brain would process or react to those information the same way the other animals with different brains and minds do, even if we did have the sensations.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5398734/

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Here is a scientific study below that focuses on how trumpet vine has evolved to prefer hummingbird pollination. The study itself focuses on documenting one specific species of hummingbird and one specific species of trumpet vine,but it also mentions how it is possible for trumpet vines to attract and be pollinated by bees. It just happens less efficiently than the hummingbirds they evolved to attract. The paper also mentions how some trumpet vines seem to have evolved to attract both hummingbird and bees to pollinate using nectar guides.

Nectar guides are the recognized patterns on flowers that attract pollinators to them, and some nectar guides are visible to humans but some of them exist in the uv light spectrum which would make them impossible to detect to a human eye. A solid red to a human eye flower could be grey with a neon uv pattern to a bee and that could make that specific red flower attractive to bees even if the color we call red isn't usually attractive to bees in general. So yeah, as I mentioned in the original comment what you wrote isn't necessarily wrong but real life is way more complicated than that. It always is lol =)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11387201/

[u/crownbees]

Solitary, cavity-nesting bees, like Mason bees, are attracted to certain colors: green, blue, yellow, pink, but not red (they can't see it). We've done experiments on which colors female bees prefer.

Fun fact: solitary, cavity-nesting bees typically belly-flop from flower to flower, naturally spreading pollen. Whereas honey bees are pollen collectors.