This was originally a brilliant undergraduate dissertation by Joe Craig-Jackson at the @UniOfHull, cosupervised by @BioScienceMum and with data from Francis Gilbert, all coauthors. Very happy this undergrad science project is finally seeing the light.

Hoverflies mimicking other hymenopterans chose more yellow flowers. Yes, these choices were similar to the other hymenopterans, but they were also similar to choices made by non-mimic hoverflies, and (as we knew) their fly ancestors more generally.

Of the Hymenopteran groups we sampled (bumblebees, honeybees, solitary bees, social wasps), only bumblebees showed a clear tendency to appear on more blue flowers. Other bees and wasps chose more yellow and less blue flowers.

We used 900 internet photographs from citizen/community science repositories of insect photos (such as iNaturalist and Bugguide) as a sampler of flower colours visited by >80 different Hymenopterans and their hoverfly mimics.

Excited to share our new preprint, in which we show that mimic hoverflies' flower colour preferences tend to follow those of their models. If the bees you are mimicking prefer visiting blue flowers, then so do you! Comments welcome (image: Peter O'Connor)

Alright, no need to rub it in.

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Honeybees having an end-of-season feast on our Sedum 😍

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Most of our larvae are now cocoons. Our @bbsrc and @NERCscience funded projects are tracking pollen nutrition plus larval size and development time in response to manipulated temperature (heated nests) and diet (swapped pollen balls) #climate #ecology #evolution #pollinators

Bee activity winds down and we have many pollen samples to analyse - clear colour variation so we expect differences, but is this associated with nest temperature? We will have to wait to find out! photo @Jamiesmithbio

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