Surprise Bad Guys

Orchids are the charming cads of the flower world.

You know about charming cads. They’re handsome, often outrageously so. They lure you in with intoxicating promises, and then, having used you up in one way or another, they dump you and say Next! 

Those dainty orchids have this down to an art. Picture an orchid blossom, say, the pink lady slipper (Cypripedium acaule), one of our North American natives, which you may be lucky enough to find blooming in piney woods around May. Its elegant pouch-like “slipper” petal plays the lead part in caddish trickery. 

Like most flowers, the orchid needs to attract pollinators to get its sperm (pollen) to an egg (the ovary). Color or scent or a combination of those does the attracting, but most flowers also provide a material reward for busy bees and butterflies. Sometimes it’s pollen itself. If you closely observe a bee roaming around the head of a daisy, you might notice its hindmost pair of legs looking like fat golden jodhpurs—they’re loaded up with that yummy, protein-packed pollen. Or the flower might offer a rich sweet nectar that the hummingbird moth or the bumblebee or the tiger swallowtail butterfly can sip. Sometimes a flower gets flamboyant and offers both.

Here is where the orchid’s caddish behavior comes in. It has no nectar, and its pollen is enclosed in a couple of little sacs that can’t be harvested for consumption. Unlike daisies or bee balm or sweetpeas, the seductive orchid gives a hopeful bee only one small area of ingress, into the slipper, to get at what she hopes will be a nectar or pollen jackpot. Once inside, she can follow only one route, lined with markers functioning like the light rods that airline ground staff use to guide the 747 to its gate. It’s a tight fit, and Bee can’t back out when she discovers that no nectar awaits. She has to bumble on through, and as she does, she brushes against the pollen sacs, which transfer onto the top of her head. A bee has no more chance of consuming a pollen sac stuck to her head than you would have of scarfing up a hamburger Gorilla-Glued to your scalp. 

After much travail, Bee finds the sole exit: a small slit at the back of the pouch. She emerges, no doubt gasping and with elevated heart rate, into the air again.

Don’t ask why Bee would try another orchid, going through the same tight passage, where the pollen sacs get dislodged in just the right tight spot to get that sperm to the egg. Don’t we all fall for charming cads more than once? But maybe the bees are smarter than I give them credit for. Orchids are notoriously slow to reproduce. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool her twice, and Bee won’t be back.