August 4, 2017

Bees also like paintings of flowers

Filed under: Animals by Orangemaster @ 11:16 pm

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A while back, we wrote about cats liking boxes drawn on the floor, but this time it’s about bees liking paintings of sunflowers, like the world famous one from Vincent van Gogh.

“Flower colours have evolved over 100 million years to address the colour vision of their bee pollinators.” With this in mind, investigators Professor Lars Chittka and Julian Walker of Queen Mary College, University of London, decided to investigate whether bees might also be attracted to paintings of flowers, for example (a copy of) Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’.

The whole study can be found here. According to the study, Van Gogh scored the best with the bees, apparently stimulating the bees’ green receptors most strongly, the receptors that spot flowers from afar.

(Link and photo www.improbable.com)

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