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Photobiology

How flowers get the blues to lure bees

Nature volume 550, pages 467–468 (2017)Cite this article

The petals of a range of flowers harbour repeated patterns of nanostructures that show similar levels of disorder across species. This degree of disorder produces a blue halo of scattered light that helps bees to find flowers. See Article p.469

The ability to effectively pass genetic material to a sexual partner is a powerful driver of evolution. Humans and other mobile organisms have evolved so that sexual partners are attracted to one another. But immobile organisms such as plants must rely on an intermediary carrier — bees carrying genetic material in pollen, for instance. These carriers are crucial to the survival of immobile species, and have co-evolved closely with them1,2. Moyroud et al.3 report on page 469 that diverse flowering plants have evolved to produce a 'blue halo' of colour that attracts bumblebees (Bombus terrestris).

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Figure 1: A blue halo of colour on the petals of Ursinia calendulifolia.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, 92093, California, USA

    Dimitri D. Deheyn

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  1. Dimitri D. Deheyn
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Correspondence to Dimitri D. Deheyn.

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Deheyn, D. How flowers get the blues to lure bees. Nature 550, 467–468 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature24155

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