why are flowers so colorful?

Have you ever wondered why flowers come in so many colours? It’s because bright colours help attract pollinators – small insects, mammals, or birds that can pick up a flower’s pollen and help spread it around. Without pollinators, flowers couldn’t reproduce, and we wouldn’t have many of the flowers and fruits that we enjoy today.

But did you know that to one of the biggest pollinators, the honey bee, a flower looks completely different than it does to you or me?

Bees have very large, complex eyes. Human eyes have one lens to help focus light onto the back of the eye, but a bee’s eye contains over 8,500 lenses, each one pointing in a slightly different direction. To a bee, the world probably looks like a mosaic of thousands of tiny images.

Bees also see colours differently than we do. A bee cannot see red at all. Instead, bees can see colours that are invisible to humans. These colours, called the ultra-violet, are found on flowers in patterns that act almost like runway lights, guiding the bee to the nectar at the centre of these flowers. A flower that may look yellow to us may have a dark centre to a bee’s eye, pointing the bee to the nectar it needs and letting it pick up the flower’s pollen in the process!

So next time you stop to smell the roses, take a moment to wonder just how many colours you aren’t seeing!