Landing Lights for Bumblebees Current Event

By Science Daily

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101011210027.htm

A new study has showed that Bumblebees like growing plants with red flowers or flowers with stripes along their veins better than normal ones. This has proven useful for farmers who need bees to pollinate their crops, or just for normal people who need to pollinate the plants in our garden. This was first discovered using the field observations of the snapdragon, or the Antirrinum majus, at the John Innes Centre of UK. Bumblebees are essential since they pollinate crops and plants and make it possible for them to reproduce. "Stripes following the veins of flowers are one of the most common floral pigmentation patterns so we thought there must be some advantage for pollination," said Professor Cathie Martin. In simple language this means that the most common flower color patterns are when the stripes follow the veins, so we had already predicted that this had some advantage to pollination. An experiment has been made in which students record how many times an average bumblebee visits each plant. The flowers with venation (vein) patterns that were either red or striped were visited a lot more than the ones that were white or pink. The number of flowers visited per plant increased, too. It is important to understand how bees live and to find out more about them. Bees give us a lot of the food on our silver platters, whether it is direct or indirect. A decrease in the Bumblebee population could have severe effects in the human population, too.

I thought this article was pretty cool. If I were a bee I would just go to the plant with the most nutrients to make honey- I haven’t really thought about how to find this plant. The article gave a really detailed explanation about why stripy plants would be easier to find for bees, but I don’t really understand how plants with red flowers attract bees more than ones with pink or white flowers. Maybe they’re colorblind, and red is a color that they can see really well. I just made my own theory! I also think that it’s pretty amazing that if something big happened to make the bumblebee population decrease rapidly it would have effects on the human race. Somehow it’s hard for me to think that bees play such a big role in our lives. I mean sure, we’ll miss honey, but we can live without that. I don’t really eat plants that have to be pollinated either, since it’s mostly flowers. Nowadays farmers plant their own crops at the beginning of every season- they don’t need bees to plant them for them. Bees sure are a mystery.