Mother's Day Bouquet

Surprise!  Thanks to my one-and-only son, Jamie, for a week there has been a beautiful basket of flowers to admire on a table in a high-traffic area - many trips by there every day!  With blue and yellow as the theme, how could he go wrong?  Blue is my favorite color and probably blue and yellow my favorite color combination! Included are pale yellow carnations, golden Factor daisies, yellow lilies, electric blue delphiniums, purple statice.  It didn't take long to wonder if bees would approve.

Bees do not see colors the way people do.  In fact, they only see four colors - yellow, blue, blue-green and ultraviolet.  Blue-green? ! They cannot detect red, which is no different than black for them.  Green is seen as yellow, and purple as blue.  The bouquet with its fern fronds would probably look mostly yellow to bees, especially now that the lilies are open.   This website has an explanation of some experiments that were used to find out about bees' sense of color - http://www.sewanee.edu/chem/chem&art/Detail_Pages/ColorProjects_2003/Crone/index.htm

Bee's vision differs not only in the perception of color.  Insects have compound eyes that are made up of a myriad of smaller individual eyes called ommatidia. Each contributes something that could be compared to a pixel in a digital photograph to the bee's view of the world rather than each one presenting a tiny but complete image that is repeated hundreds of times.  This website has an interesting way to simulate at least in part how a bee sees -  http://andygiger.com/science/beye/beyehome.html.  

I can only show what the basket of flowers looks through the "eye" or lens of a camera.  You will have to take my word that I do approve and thank Jamie for adding my favorite colors to this past week!