Subject: Re: Best color to attract bees

From: [email-masked] (Doug Yanega)
Date: 12 Apr 1995 23:43:54 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
(Barb M. Fowler) wrote:

> Could someone tell me if bright colored flowers attract bees
> more than white flowers?  I am doing an investigation in science
> and am graphing the results.  I plan on watching the bees for
> an hour to see which flowers they like the best.  Thanks for 
> your time and any suggestions you can give me.  Sean and Matt--
> 7th grade science students.

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this. I can give several
reasons (1) if you're in the wild, there are many more bees than honeybees
to contend with, each of which may have its own innate color preference
(2) color alone doesn't determine attractiveness, often odor is involved
(3) if the bees are either honeybees or bumblebees, a forager will be most
attracted to a flower of whatever color it last *profitably* visited; so
if there have been a lot of really rewarding yellow flowers around, a
white flower will be less attractive than a yellow, whereas if there were
a lot of great white flowers out there, the reverse would be true (bees
won't stay on a flower that has too little food, no matter how much they
might have been attracted to it prior to landing there) (4) bees can see
UV and you can't, and what you see as two equally white flowers may be two
completely different colors to a bee, if one is UV-reflective and the
other is not (similarly, a yellow flower might be UV reflective or not,
etc. - by missing that primary color component, what your eyes tell you is
a "brightly-colored" flower may have nothing to do with how the bee
preceives it; worst of all are red flowers, which to you may be
brightly-colored, but to a bee they're effectively black). As you can see,
there are a lot of complications, and it's pretty hard to tease them
apart. People *still* haven't figured out all the details, and no one can
make very reliable predictions of what bees will do based on color alone.
I'm not trying to be discouraging, just trying to let you know what you're
getting into!
Cheers,
-- 
Doug Yanega
Illinois Natural History Survey, Center for Biodiversity
607 E. Peabody Dr. Champaign, IL 61820  USA
"There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is
    the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick