Flower constancy

Definition

A honey bee that starts on bramble works bramble, and largely ignores clover growing beside it. From the bee's side this is efficient — she has learned to handle that flower and switching costs time. From the plant's side it is the entire reason bees are worth paying: pollen delivered to another flower of the same species is pollination, and pollen delivered elsewhere is wasted.

Where the word gets used loosely

Constancy is why monofloral honey exists at all. Bees cannot be confined to one plant, and they behave as though they were within a trip — so a landscape dominated by one flowering species yields a crop that comes overwhelmingly from it.

Guide records that discuss this

• How bees find flowersBees see ultraviolet, cannot see red, detect a flower's electric field and learn scent faster than almost any other insect. Flowers, for their part, have spent a hundred million years advertising to them.
• How pollination worksPlants cannot move, so they pay something that can. Pollination is a transaction, and understanding it as one explains almost everything about flower shape.
• Honey in ancient GreeceThe first systematic observation of a bee colony anywhere, the first honey traded on the reputation of a hillside, and a set of errors about bee reproduction that survived for two thousand years.

Question records that discuss this

• How do bees choose which flowers to visit?By colour, scent, pattern, shape and — decisively — by learning. Bees see ultraviolet and not red, follow nectar guides invisible to us, remember which species paid well, and largely stick to one species per trip. That last habit, flower constancy, is what makes them useful pollinators rather than merely nectar thieves.