How many insects visit a single dandelion flower in one day?

A flower fly, skipper butterfly, and flower beetle all visit a dandelion at the same time.

On average, how many insects visit a flower in one day?  Five?  Ten?  A hundred?  Perhaps a thousand?  The value is highly dependent upon so many factors.  Temperature is an important one, especially in the morning, when many insects are waiting for the warmth of the day to enable flight.  Then there is the nature of the bloom itself:  colour, scent, build, and even location.  Time of year, availability of other flowers, perhaps more enticing or numerous, and so on.

It turns out that there is a way to figure this out.  A FIT count (flower-insect timed count) is a way to track pollinators on flower interactions.  The essence of the count is to pay attention to a small area of one species of flower for a period of 10 minutes and record all the insects that land on the blooms.  It was a system of observation that started in the UK but has been used elsewhere (The University of Calgary has a brochure on FIT counts - click here to see it).

An average value for a FIT count ends up being 9, meaning that 9 insects visit a particular bloom or small area of blooms in 10 minutes, which works out to about one a minute.  We can use this to extrapolate how many insects may visit a dandelion bloom in a day.

Assuming 12 hours of reasonable light and warmth for a day, that makes 720 insect visits a day.  Now, this number is highly theoretical, but I don't think it is unreasonable to say that a flower may have anywhere from 500 to 1000 visits a day by a variety of insects.

Isn't that interesting?

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com

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