Will you bee mine?

Midsummer is traditionally the time for love in the open air and the grassy hollows in the sand dunes behind Newport beach always show signs of being a popular trysting place in warm weather.

The dunes are also a habitat for bee orchids who share these amorous intentions. Their affections are strictly 'entophilus' and they love insects so much that their flowers have evolved to mimic them.

The flowers of the bee orchid resemble the bees they need to pollinate them, each having pink 'wings' and a central hairy brown 'bee body' patterned with yellow spots and lines. Each flower appears as if, at the centre of the three pink petals, a small hairy bee is sucking nectar.

So the male bee, out on the wing and on the pull, spies - sitting on a stalk - what appears to be a well-fit female bee (who is also attractively scented with irresistible bee pheromones) and he zooms in to get better acquainted. The resulting clinch transfers pollen from the flower to Mr Bee, who then redirects his attention to a neighbouring bee flower, and in so doing passes on the pollen to the new recipient of his affections. So the orchid is fertilized while the busy bee has yet to meet Miss Right - but then, as the man said (in A Midsummer Night's Dream), 'the course of true love never did run smooth' for bees just as for lads and lasses.