Some like it hot.

From a paper in last week's edition of the journal 'Nature' comes news that some bees may be looking for more than nectar when they visit flowers - they are also looking for warmth. Insects use large amounts of energy maintaining their body temperature and some flowers offer warmth, using color to advertise its presence.

The paper by Adrian Dyer and colleagues describes a controlled experiment that showed that bumblebees preferred to visit warmer flowers, and they learnt to use color to predict floral temperature before landing.

You can access the editorial summary at the Nature site, a news report at the New Scientist website and, if you have a UC Berkeley IP address or a proxy server you should be able to access the article from the nature link.