This is Scientific American 60 Second Science. I'm Christopher in Tagyatta.

Honey bees are the charismatic microfauna of the pollination world, but flies, bumblebees, butterflies, and moths, they all pollinate too,

with varying degrees of success. The poorer ones are technically referred to as inefficient

pollinators. Those that do visit, but transfer very little pollen in their visit.

Florian Shestel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Zurich.

Shestel and his colleague grew field mustard plants, and they exposed them to two types of pollinators,

efficient bumblebees and inefficient hoverflies.

After just 11 generations, they found that the plants visited by bumblebees were taller,

twice as fragrant, and reflected more UV light, a visual signal for bees.

And those factors made the progeny even more attractive to bumblebees at the end of the experiment, a sign the plants

had adapted to their pollinator's preferences.

But the plants that got a fly-by from the flies, they grew shorter, less fragrant, and actually adapted to do more self-pollination,

because hoverflies are lousy pollinators.

The studies in the journal Nature Communications.

So with honey bees in peril, what happens if we lose

them? This will trigger an evolutionary response in the plants. For example, if flies

take over as more important pollinators as they used to be in the past, then very likely will have some evolutionary change going on.

And if the change is self-pollination, that could be trouble.

Because self-pollination leads to reduction of genetic variability in the population.

This can be a problem for the plants because they have a reduced ability to evolve resistance against diseases.

Meaning that if we lose pollinators, it's the plant's genomes that may go to seed.

Thanks for listening. to seed.

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