A Choice of Blues

Earlier this summer pollen and nectar-seeking insects at the entrance to Halibut Point State Park were tempted by two different types of flowers blooming along a stone wall.

Chicory Cichorium intybus (foreground) and Viper's-Bugloss Echium vulgare (behind)

A bumblebee chooses to land on a flower at left center

I watched with interest as the pairings of pollination followed specific patterns. Bumblebees always went to the bugloss, never to the chicory.

Honeybee

Honeybees also visited the bugloss exclusively. My curiosity sharpened a bit, wondering whether the pattern resulted from taste, smell, flower structure, insect anatomy, or even color preference. After all, all blues are not alike.

Silver-spotted Skipper

The pattern continued with butterflies, which all preferred the bugloss flowers.

Cabbage White

Monarch

I decided that the more deeply colored bugloss made a lovelier association with the butterflies than the chicory would have. Was I abandoning science for aesthetics, or soft thinking? Wait a minute: why decouple  aesthetics, the sense of beauty, from intellect? Both those aspects of mind grow from the same evolutionary advance.

European Woolcarder Bee on chicory

Curiously, some other kinds of bees parted ways with the bumblebees and honeybees, going exclusively to the chicory flowers.

Bicolored Striped Sweat Bee, Halictidae

A little research online revealed that chicory is particularly attractive to short-tongued bees. Sure enough, that includes the Halictid family represented in the photo above. Conversely, bumblebees and honeybees are in the long-tongued family Apidae which forage well on tubular flowers.

Syrphus species of Syrphid family

Various species of Hover Flies (Syrphidae) joined the array of insects pollinating the chicory flowers.

Typocerus velutinus - Banded Longhorn Beetle

The nectar-seeking opportunists-or more properly, partners-in the chicory corollas included this Banded Longhorn Beetle.

One wonders whether the shape and color of the flowers are as influential in these attractions as they are to people. The sight of chicory has stimulated an impressive variety of words and poetry. Evocative words like azure.

Closer acquaintance with bugloss, however, reveals subtleties of form and color well beyond botanic interest, and perhaps ecstatic to certain bugs eyes. Red gets into the picture, pulling it to purple.