When I was a kid, I had me a fear of bees. I used to joke that I wanted to come up with a cure for bees, a joke which obviously made sense to a ten year old smart-ass. Today I’m still sort of uncomfortable with bees, but the reaction is under control.

But I was just reading an article on Science Daily that made me think back to those innocent days, and how some things might just really like the fact that there are bees. Take for instance the little bugger to the left. No, not the insect, the plant.

That’s Dendrobium sinense, a kind of orchid that uses a rather crafty bit of olfactory sneakiness to fool hornets into pollinating it. Rather than smelling like a particular kind of flower, it smells like Z-11-eicosen-1-ol, which is presumably pronounced “zed-eleven-something-one-awl”, which is a pheromone honeybees use to say “Crap, I need help cuz there are hornets trying to kill me to feed their larvae”.

Interesting stuff, I have to say. It’s no cure for bees, but a neat way the natural world shows just how sneaky it can be.

Jim