Tricking the Bees: How Some Flowers Cheat

Abstract

Flowers usually provide their pollinators with food, such as nectar. But some flowers trick their pollinators into pollinating without offering any food. Cheater flowers from the same species can be of different colors, and this might confuse the pollinators, because they have to visit many flowers before learning that all of the colors represent cheater flowers. To investigate this, we trained bees to visit artificial flowers that we could change the color of. The bees learned which colors represent flowers with no food, and they preferred to take a risk visiting flowers with new colors, instead of the ones they already recognized as cheaters. Also, bees visited more flowers and spent more time visiting them when flowers of two different colors were presented, compared to when only one color of flowers was available. We confirmed that presenting flowers of more colors is a good strategy for tricking pollinators and thus increasing pollination events.