One had petals made using perfectly aligned gratings that gave normal iridescence. The researchers tested this by training bees to associate sugar with two types of artificial flower. Humans can occasionally see these patterns but they are usually invisible to us against red or yellow pigmented backgrounds that look much darker to bees. The question was whether the flaws in the wax patterns were “designed” to generate the intense blues, violets and ultra-violets that bees see most strongly. The color perception of bees is shifted towards the blue end of the spectrum compared to ours. These imperfections meant that instead of giving a rainbow as a CD does, the patterns worked much better for blue and ultra-violet light than other colours, creating what the researchers called a “blue halo.” There was good reason to suspect that this wasn’t a coincidence. And they weren’t quite perfect in very similar ways in all of the types of flowers that they looked at. The spacing and alignment of the grooves weren’t quite as perfect as expected. But researchers investigating the way that some flowers use iridescence to attract bees to pollinate have noticed something odd. Many flowers use grooves between one and two thousandths of a millimeter apart in the wax coating on their surface to produce iridescence in a similar way. As your viewing angle shifts, the amplified colors change to give the shimmering, morphing color effect that you see.īees can see a blue halo around the purple region. It’s caused by interactions between light waves bouncing off the closely spaced microscopic indentations in its surface, which means some colors become more intense at the expense of others. The shifting rainbow colours you can see on a CD are an example of iridescence. But some flowers also use iridescence, a different type of color produced when light reflects from microscopically spaced structures or surfaces. Most flowers appear colorful because they contain light-absorbing pigments that reflect only certain wavelengths of light. And, what’s more, by studying these systems we might be able to put them to use in our own technologies.
Light of hidden flowers full#
Plants are actually full of this kind of “nanotechnology," that enables them to do all kinds of amazing things, from cleaning themselves to generating energy. This fascinating phenomenon shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to scientists. Nanoscale patterns on the petals reflect light in a way that effectively creates a “blue halo” around the flower that helps attract the bees and encourages pollination. And new research has just given us a greater insight into how this signal works. Flowers have a secret signal that’s specially tailored for bees so they know where to collect nectar.
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