Without loyalty, a meadow would be a much less colourful place. If a bee sticks to just one species of flower, the chances are good that it’ll transfer pollen from one individual to another. If it flits between many species, its efficiency as a pollinator plummets, its flowery partners produce fewer seeds, and the meadow loses its sea of vibrant petals.

And unfortunately, this bucolic dystopia might happen very easily. By removing bees from enclosed fields, Berry Brosi and Heather Briggs from the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado have shown that the loss of a single pollinating species leads to a field-wide loss of loyalty. The remaining pollinators start visiting a wider range of flowers, chauffeuring pollen to