Turn your sunflowers to the east to attract more bees

Sunflower house owners ought to flip their crops eastwards so as to attract more bees and produce a better quantity of pollen, a brand new research suggests.

The yellow-petalled crops oscillate and tilt their heads in accordance to a pure time cycle often called a circadian clock, which follows the solar. However, researchers have discovered that, as the flowers mature, they cease following their regular timings and start to face east, which attracts more pollinators than these dealing with west.

They additionally found that east-facing flowers produce more pollen, in addition to bigger and heavier seeds, to coincide with the time that bees go to.

To perform the research, the staff from the University of Virginia, in the USA, took sterile male crops which might produce seeds however not make pollen and surrounded them with regular crops dealing with east or west. 

They then used genotyping to distinguish whether or not these have been pollinated by east or west-facing crops and located pollen from the east-facing ones was chargeable for more offspring.

Stacey Harmer, professor of plant biology in the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences and senior writer on the paper stated: “It’s quite striking that they face east. It’s better for them to face east as they produce more offspring.”

In a collection of experiments, Prof Harmer and her colleagues discovered east-facing flower heads have been larger in temperature in the morning than west-facing ones – engaging to bees foraging in the morning. She stated rays of direct daylight additionally paint ultraviolet markings on the flower petals which are seen to bees however not the human eye.