Flowers lure bees

Hundreds of flower species have evolved the ability to project ethereal halos of blue light invisible to humans in order to lure pollinating bees, researchers said.

In laboratory experiments, bumblebees were drawn to synthetic flowers designed to generate the same kind of ultraviolent rings, they reported in the journal Nature.

“The effect occurs in the ultraviolent part of the optical spectrum that we cannot see,” co-author Ullrich Steiner, a researcher at the Adolphe Merkle Institute in Fribourg, Switzerland, told media. “But bees can.” Researchers were surprised by the results.