1 8 THE COLOURS OF FLOWERS. 



of bees and butterflies are usually red, purple, lilac, or 

 blue. Certain insects always visit one species of 

 flower alone ; and others pass from blossom to 

 blossom of one kind only on a single day, though 

 they may vary a little from kind to kind as the season 

 advances, and one species replaces another. Mijller, 

 the most statistical of naturalists, has noticed that 

 while bees form seventy-five per cent, of the insects 

 visiting the very developed composites, they form 

 only fourteen per cent, of those visiting umbelliferous 

 plants, which have, as a rule, open but by no means 

 showy white flowers. Certain blossoms which lay 

 themselves out to attract wasps are, as he quaintly 

 puts it, '* obviously adapted to a less aesthetically 

 cultivated circle of visitors." And some livid red 

 flowers actually resemble in their colour and odour 

 decaying raw meat, thus inducing bluebottle flies to 

 visit them and so carry their pollen from head to 

 head. 



Down to the minutest distinctions between species, 

 this correlation of flowers to the tastes of their par- 

 ticular guests seems to hold good. Hermann Miiller 

 notes that the common Galium of our heaths and 

 hedges {G. inollugo) is white, and therefore visited by 

 small flies ; while the lady's bedstraw, its near relative 

 {G. venivi)^ is yellow, and owes its fertilisation to little 

 beetles. Mr. H. O. Forbes counted on one occasion 

 the visits he saw paid to the flowers on a single bank ; 

 and he found that a particular bumble-bee sucked the 

 honey of thirty purple dead nettles in succession, 

 passing over without notice all the other plants in 

 the neighbourhood ; two other species of bumble-bee 

 and a cabbage-butterfly also patronised the same dead- 



