Pink Venus slipper orchid (Cypripedium acaule).
Wild orchid tricks bees with a floral trap, but doesn’t eat them, like Venus flytraps: it’s just to ensure pollination.
A beautiful, seemingly delicate flower of the woods is, in fact, an ingenious trick.
Known as pink lady’s slipper (or pink Venus slipper orchid), the Cypripedium acaule it attracts bees to a kind of floral “escape room” — and the pollinators can only leave when they fulfill the mission that the pink slipper-shaped plant satisfies.
The species belongs to the vast family of orchids, which, according to , brings together around 28 thousand species. It generally blooms between May and July in several areas of eastern North America, where it makes the most of its color and scent to attract pollinators. The big difference is what happens afterwards.
Upon entering the flower’s inflated sac, the bee hopes to find nectar. It’s a trap. The flyer doesn’t find any reward and gets trapped inside. The only way out? It is in the upper part of the flower, where there is a single, very narrow opening. It is during the escape that the insect brushes against the plant’s reproductive structures and comes out covered in pollen.
The bee ends up leaving the flower “confused”, “betrayed”, but deluded enough to fall for the same trick soon after, when visiting another flower of the same species, recently observed. It is precisely this repeated deception that allows the plant to ensure the pollination of the next generation.
The pink Venus slipper works more or less like the Venus flytrap’s trap for flies, but unlike the famous carnivorous plant (Dionaea muscipula), which captures and digests insects, the orchid does not kill its visitors. He simply manipulates them for his own benefit.
