rjzimmerman:If you’re interested in flowers, and more generally in botany, this book might be intere
rjzimmerman:If you’re interested in flowers, and more generally in botany, this book might be interesting. Smithsonian just published an interview with the author. Here’s the link to the interview. Couple of excerpts from the interview:What botanical puzzle would you most like to answer?I’d like to know how bees are most attracted to flowers and the most important sensory cues used in recognizing flowers from a distance. We know very little about this subject, especially in nature, outside of the artificial-flower testing arrays used by many modern behaviorists. Bees have thousands of tiny ommatidia, which together make up their compound eyes. Their visual acuity is only about one-sixtieth that of our human eyes. A flying bee needs to be almost on top of a bloom, about a foot away, before it can make the bloom out, although “flicker fusion” (the ability to detect rapid changes across their visual field) allows bees to detect the highly saturated spots of floral colors while flying across a meadow. My fantasy would be to see the world as a bee does, to become a flying bee, but only for a few minutes, because of all the entomologists, birds, spiders and lizards lurking nearby. What destination in the world has the best blooms?For wildflowers growing outdoors, the Sonoran Desert around my home in Tucson. Every year we have the dependable palo verde trees bursting into brilliant yellow, but every 10 or 20 years the desert puts on spectacular wildflower displays, including Arizona poppies, owl’s clover, lupines and globe mallows, among others. -- source link
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