By old, I mean stuff I probably learned about when I was little and haven’t thought about since.
First up is a little yellow flower that I remember having thrust under my chin by someone demanding to know if I liked butter. Apparently the humble buttercup could detect the type of topping I liked on my toast. Of course it couldn’t, but the yellow petals do have a superpower of sorts.
They’ve got lots of layers and a structure that contains a special carotenoid pigment which absorbs blue and green light. As a result? Other colours of the spectrum, mainly yellow, are reflected back. Wow! How cool is nature? And how clever are we to see all the colours of the rainbow in the first place? When we check out buttercups and chins we’re actually using our very sophisticated eyes to distinguishing wavelengths of light. Now that’s wild.
Of course we humans aren’t the only ones who have a fondness for flowers and we don’t depend on them as directly as other species, or do we? In the spirit of learning something else new, and also buttercup related, I thought I’d delve a little deeper into why we find pretty flowers so pleasing.
It’s to do with the complex ecosystem we live in. We might be tempted to think that we’re quite removed from the birds and the bees but little pollinators, who feed on the buttercups we admire in summer are responsible for helping an estimated 85 per cent of plants on the planet reproduce. From apples and pears to coffee, cotton and vanilla, those busy bees keep us fed and clothed as well as surrounded by beautiful plants. This isn’t new news and because bees are in trouble there’s plenty of fuss about preserving our pollinators, especially if you pay attention to wildlife organisations like ours.
But I thought I’d take an even closer look at what’s going on with the tiny creatures that care even more about buttercups than me.
Did you know that under a microscope, a bee’s tongue looks like a mop and functions like a straw? How about that for a funky fact? Bees unfurl their mop-tongue into a flower and slurp up nectar from the bottom of the blossom. One of the consequences of the bee crisis is that bees with shorter tongues, are emerging as better bees and are surviving more. As a result and due to some rather speedy natural selection and evolution, according to a recent study, tongues in bees have got shorter over the last forty years.
Why? Because they may not be able to fill up on all the nectar in a long-tubed flower but a smaller tongue means a bee can collect food from many different varieties of flowers particularly ones with flatter petal like, you guessed it, the buttercup!
How about that for some unbelievable buttery and bee related buttercup new know how?