“Here and there in the deep shade under the beeches is a species of orchid called violet helleborine (Epipactis purpurata). Antony explains that the orchids time their flowering for when fruits have fallen to the ground and wasps are patrolling for food. Bees avoid the gloom of the understory—with few flowers, there’s little to entice them—but wasps don’t mind it, and are attracted to the helleborines by the promise of an intoxicating nectar (itself made by a symbiosis with fungi). When they drink it, becoming dusted with pollen as they do so, the wasps seem to get drunk. They give up on personal hygiene; they let themselves go. This means they don’t groom themselves with anything like the care they normally would, and pollen remains stuck to them. They stagger to the next flower, like a pub crawl with bonus pollination events. If you examine the orchid flowers, you’ll find a sort of shield stopping the pollen falling from the male parts of the flower onto the female parts, preventing self-pollination.”
Interesting stories worth reading