Magnolias Are So Old That They're Pollinated by Beetles, Not Bees

sspeckx 5 days ago 37 commentsRead Article on mymodernmet.com

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mvidal01•24 minutes ago

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-...

baxtr•9 minutes ago

What’s the best security control against this robbery?!

chabes•5 days ago

A lot of plants aren’t pollinated by bees. There’s pollinator wasps, flies, moths, butterflies… even birds and bats are pollinators

FerretFred•25 minutes ago

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).

rantallion•9 minutes ago

Seeds are not gametes. While your dog may help spread the seeds, they are not assisting in the sexual reproduction itself.

rob74•35 minutes ago

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-moth

barrenko•1 minute ago

Very common around my mom's house.

fyhn•28 minutes ago

I noticed these for the first time earlier this summer. Incredible insects! They really do give a hummingbird impression.

danielheath•27 minutes ago

And... wolves?

https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy....

broeng•38 minutes ago

And olive trees have genders, with the male pollinating the surrounding females.

williamdclt•about 3 hours ago

mosquitoes too, though it pains me to give them credit for anything

nkrisc•about 2 hours ago

True, all mosquitoes drink nectar, and only females of some species drink blood.

palata•about 3 hours ago

Ants as well

Foobar8568•about 3 hours ago

Yeah I was about to say ants with passion fruit flowers.

TacticalMalice•about 2 hours ago

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.

palata•about 3 hours ago

Pretty sure I see many bees on Magnolias.

Diogenesian•about 2 hours ago

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.

rob74•20 minutes ago

You mean honeybees? Because there are lots of other (wild) bee species that are very specialized. And they also contradict most of the other things we think we know about bees: they are usually solitary, and they rarely sting (honeybees only do that to protect the hive).

Maybe it's the other way around: humans selected honeybees to "domesticate" because of their versatility (and of course the fact that they produced honey)?

ggus•3 minutes ago

Around my location (southern brazil) there are hundreds of species of stingless bees, living in colonies. Many (most?) produce honey too. I don't dispute that there are also lots of solitary bees. Bees are wonderful and way more diverse than people usually think.

datakan•about 2 hours ago

Jumping spiders are smarter

Diogenesian•39 minutes ago

Are they? They are smarter than web-spinning spiders but I've never read anything suggesting they are smarter than bees.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3357

WhyIsItAlwaysHN•about 2 hours ago

Spiders are not insects though https://www.burkemuseum.org/collections-and-research/biology...

actionfromafar•about 2 hours ago

Thanks, I never thought about bees like that. They certainly can use many types of flowers, as evidenced by various sorts of honey. Nitpick: some spiders are pretty darn intelligent and even seem to dream when they sleep, apparently.

yubblegum•about 2 hours ago

Now I am musing about spider nightmares.

globular-toast•about 3 hours ago

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.

cachius•about 1 hour ago

Living fossils, like Ginkos

And Equisetum/Horsetail/Schachtelhalm

tmoertel•about 1 hour ago

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.

mvidal01•29 minutes ago

I have mountain mint growing in my yard and every pollinator imaginable goes to that plant.

Sharlin•33 minutes ago

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.

Mistletoe•44 minutes ago

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.

https://imgur.com/a/OAHQCW4