A flower advertises with color
 Q: Why are flowers coloured? -Juliana M., United Kingdom
A: A flower's colors tout a delicious source of nectar and entice insects in for a free lunch. As the insect
bumbles around in the flower seeking nectar, he fertilizes the plant's egg cell like we track mud into a clean
kitchen floor. That starts the building of a seed so the plant can reproduce.
[Corel] The colors of a flower advertise its nectar.
Long ago (about 65,000,000 to 225,000,000 years), a plant first flowered in tropical rain forests. At that time, primitive beetles crawled
around in the same jungles but no bees nor butterflies existed. Some of those early beetles were already eating spore and they took a
liking to pollen. These pollen eaters tracked pollen into nearby flowers now and then, which fertilized the ready eggs. A chancy
development but it gave the flowers an edge.
Soon flowers got smarter still and rewarded their insect buddies with a sugar-water delight: nectar. Then flowers evolved colors to
advertise the nectar and even produced color guides to lead the insects right to the nectar-follow the dots or lines on in.
Insects evolved in a parallel fashion, developing sucking mouthparts for pulling up nectar. A Madagascar orchid got so carried away it
ended up completely dependent on the hawkmoth. The orchid has a nectar well about 9 inches deep (22 centimeters). A sugary treat
awaits the moth's nine-inch probing snout.
Charles Darwin took one look at this bizarre orchid and predicted the existence of some insect with a correspondingly long proboscis. But
it took another 40 years before anyone discovered the hawkmoth.
(Answered by April Holladay, science correspondent, Mar. 20, 2002)
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