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- Hacker News
- "Drop the tle, it's cleaner."by greenlimetea
- Mountain mints are also pollinated by beetles—and a bazillion other critters. They are extraordinary pollinator magnets. Beetles, bees, flies, wasps, mosquitos (!), moths, butterflies, ...
A recent study of just a few mountain mint species (https://doi.org/10.1080/00222933.2024.2411072) found that they attracted a crazy variety of pollinators. Check the supplementary materials for the full list.
by tmoertel - I have spearmint in my garden, and the bees and butterflies are literally pushing each other out of the way to get at them some days.by vidarh
- I have mountain mint growing in my yard and every pollinator imaginable goes to that plant.by mvidal01
- Mosquitoes (which are flies) don’t really deserve the exclamation mark, given that the males of all mosquito species live exclusively on nectar, with the females (of most but not all species) augmenting their diet with animal protein in order to produce eggs.
The long, thin proboscis originally evolved for nectar drinking like in many other insects (and some birds!); its use for sucking animal blood was a later adaptation.
by Sharlin - Living fossils, like Ginkos
And Equisetum/Horsetail/Schachtelhalm
by cachius - Pretty sure I see many bees on Magnolias.by palata
- Right, the whole point of bees as insect pollinators (reflecting that they are recent evolutionary line) is that they are by a healthy margin the most intelligent arthropod. They will inspect then successfully pollinate anything floral over a wide geographic range. Most insect pollinators are instinctually tied to certain species/families.by Diogenesian
- My magnolia is the only thing that seems to attract honeybees, which I rarely see otherwise. The article doesn't seem to justify the "not bees" part, though. I'd imagine bees can pollinate them too.
- The giant arum is another example of beetle pollinated flowers. It smells of manure so attracts manure-loving beetles.
With more traditional pollinators, I've always found that a fascinating example of bee pollination that does not involve the plant taking advantage of the insect drinking its nectar is Ophrys Apifera, which has a distinct bee-shape silhouette and relies on the mating instincts of male bees in order to pollinate.
by cyberjar - Interesting. I never thought worker bees retained any mating instincts.by lopis
- Some insects gather nectar from a flower and don't pollinate the flower. This is called nectar robbing.
See https://www.backyardecology.net/not-all-flower-visitors-are-...
by mvidal01 - What’s the best security control against this robbery?!by baxtr
- The earliest angiosperms appeared in the Cretaceous. This is after the appearance of Hymenoptera (Jurassic) and Diptera (Triassic). While a nice story, this needs additional substantiation. An alternative explanation is likelier imo.
- The early Hymenoptera were predatory, like wasps still are.
Bees, which feed on pollen and nectar from plant flowers, instead of catching other insects, have evolved much later from wasp-like Hymenoptera, after angiosperms were already widespread.
So the timeline fits into the story.
by adrian_b - Magnolia make one of my favorite smells on earth. We have a huge one in front of a house we have moved away from and back to many times. The intoxicating smell when I mow the leaves and seeds beneath it is something I want to keep forever. I collected the red seeds and put them in a bottle with alcohol and I go back and smell it often to remember. The house flooded four days before closing on selling it, so we got more time with the house. We are wrapping that up and we will say goodbye to that old house, and it’s now quite huge magnolia in the front. I never knew the flowers were pollinated by beetles or why the scent smelled like that. I collected seeds last year and cold stratified a bunch all winter in our fridge. I planted them this spring and 7 survived the process and are now growing in red cups in my new house.by Mistletoe
- A lot of plants aren’t pollinated by bees. There’s pollinator wasps, flies, moths, butterflies… even birds and bats are pollinatorsby chabes
- And by wind. The major staple crops are all wind pollinated.by pfdietz
- If you push me into a bush then you'll make me a pollinator as wellby HughParry
- And olive trees have genders, with the male pollinating the surrounding females.by broeng
- I have to say that if we're also talking about wild grasses, my wire fox terrier is also a pollinator. He collects an incredible amount of seeds and burrs during his walkies investigations and I have to pick them out of his fur afterwards (risky because he gets annoyed easily).by FerretFred
- mosquitoes too, though it pains me to give them credit for anythingby williamdclt
- by danielheath
- My pawpaws (Asimina triloba) mainly need (house) flies to pollinate. They make their flowers look like meat.
I have a couple 100 foot rows of them, it's tricky to get good pollination.
- One of those moths is this guy, who (in flight, not so much in still images) looks and sounds like a miniature hummingbird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummingbird_hawk-mothby rob74
- These are the original articles this re-heat was created from:
- https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/magnolias-be...
- https://gardens.si.edu/learn/blog/the-botany-of-magnolias/
by teh_klev - Thanks. The first article has more info, e.g. that those beetles are flightless.
But that makes me suspect that they spend a lot of time on one tree, only pollinating that tree, which would be pointless because there is no exchange of genes.
- The second article goes into more detail:
> To minimize the risk of self-pollination, which can result in inbreeding depression and recessive mutations, the flowers open in the morning and the stigmas are receptive to pollen that is brought to them by foraging beetles throughout the day. When evening comes, the innermost tepals close around the carpel and trap the pollinating beetle. While the tepals are closed, the beetle deposits pollen all over the receptive stigmas. The stigmas then close and the anthers become active, covering the same beetle in fresh pollen so that when the sepals open in the morning, it will fly out and find another flower to pollinate. This precise delay in flower function helps to ensure cross pollination.
by cubefox