Bees also like paintings of flowers

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)

This entry was posted on Friday, August 4th, 2017 at 11:16 pm and is filed under Animals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: bees, sunflowers, Vincent van Gogh