How Sunflowers Bring All the Bees to the Yard | Deep Look

To make their seeds, sunflowers need to attract bees with a warm, bright bloom. So, the plants spend their youth preparing to face the sunrise just as the pollinators fly by.

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Sunflowers get their name from their big yellow blooms. But it’s not just about looks. Even compared to other plants, sunflowers are absolutely obsessed with the sun.

University of California, Berkeley and University of California, Davis researchers are collaborating to figure out how these plants keep an internal clock that allows them to predict where and when the sun will travel each day.

--- When do sunflowers bloom?

In most temperate areas, sunflowers are typically planted in the spring and bloom between July and September.

--- How tall do sunflowers grow?

Sunflowers can grow quickly. Some varieties only grow about 1 foot tall while others can reach 15 feet!

--- What is heliotropism?

Sunflowers exhibit a behavior called heliotropism, where the young plants track the sun, angling themselves toward the sunlight throughout the day. The term comes from the Greek word for the sun: helios.

---+ Find additional resources and a transcript on KQED Science:

https://www.kqed.org/science/1994840/...

---+ For more information:

The Harmer Lab at the University of California, Davis studies the molecular nature of the plant circadian clock and how it influences growth and development.

https://harmerlab.plantclock.org/rese...

The Blackman Lab at University of California, Berkeley studies how plants adapt to local environments, with an emphasis on how these evolutionary processes alter plant-environment interactions during development.

https://plantandmicrobiology.berkeley...

---+ More great Deep Look episodes:

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Stingless Bees Guard Tasty Honey With Barricades, Bouncers and Bites
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This Vibrating Bumblebee Unlocks a Flower's Hidden Treasure
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---+ Shoutout!

🏆Congratulations 🏆 to the following fans on our Deep Look Community Tab for correctly answering our GIF challenge! The sunflower’s head looks like one giant flower but it is actually a collection of hundreds or thousands of individual flowers. Each pollinated flower grows into a seed. We asked, what is the term for this collection of flowers and what are the tiny individual flowers called? The head is known as the capitulum or inflorescence and the individual flowers are called florets.

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