The Use of Scent
The chemists, I am told, are busy at the jot of discovering what is the use of the sweet (or sour) smell of flowers, and to this end are investigating the essential oils. These oils may be protective against insects or fungus diseases; and certainly do not in many flowers attract insects and so help the pollination, as most people hold. is any scent more pleasing than that of the garden rose? Now this scent is contained in the petals which in the much doubled flowers—and these smell the sweetest—are a hindrance to insects ; and anyway the flowers with the sweetest scent—say, rose, honeysuckle and jessamine—arc avoided by bees, which delight in such slightly scented flowers as, say, dandelion and foxglove and above all cotoneaster. Bees, of course, have an acute sense of smell—how quickly they detect either honey or water —but their preferences are not ours. As to fertilisation, a shrewd observer has been watching them in a field of flax, which has a colour they delight in, and noticed that they have developed the art of entering b) the back-door and so damage rather than benefit the blossom.
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