Most bees have struck a pretty rich deal with the plants they frequent. Lured by the promise of a nectar feast, the insects, in turn, pollinate their flowers. But the pact between male orchid bees and their preferred blooms looks much more onesided. In return for their nuptial role, the male's only reward is a dab of the orchid's scent. But it wasn't the bee's fragrance-harvesting habits that attracted Michael Dillon and Robert Dudley to the insects. It was their remarkable size range. Some orchid bees weigh in at 50 mg, while others tip the scales at I g. And they're all champion hoverers. Which made Dillon and Dudley suspect that the insects were ideal for studying the way that creatures scale up the mechanical forces that keep them aloft. Dillon headed south to the inseet's homes in Panama, where he spent three months collecting bees and testing their weightlifting prowess to get to grips with allometric scaling in insect flight (p. 417).
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