Now Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers has won another accolade: it appears to be the favourite painting for bees.

In a study at Queen Mary, University of London, three colonies of bumble bees which had never seen real flowers were presented with reproductions of four paintings: Sunflowers, Paul Gauguin’s A Vase of Flowers and two colourful works without blooms — Patrick Caulfield’s Pottery and Fernand Leger’s Still Life with a Beer Mug.

The bees were drawn innately to vibrant colours in all the paintings, but chose those depicting flowers much more often. When the bees flew towards a floral painting they landed on it 11 per cent of the time, compared with 4 per cent for the other images. The bees flew towards Sunflowers 146 times, and made 15 landings, compared with 81 approaches and 11 landings for A Vase of Flowers. The insects made plenty of approaches on the non-floral paintings — 138 for Caulfield’s Pottery, and 117 for the Fernand Léger print — but rarely landed. The findings appear online in the journal, Optics and Laser Technology.

Professor Lars Chittka, of Queen Mary’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, who led the study, said the attraction to flower paintings was easy to explain in evolutionary terms. He believes that human preferences for certain colours have an evolutionary origin — scientists have shown that colour vision evolved in our primate ancestors alongside a fruit diet.

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