In 1992, Lars Chittka and Randolf Menzel analyzed 180 flowers and worked out what kind of eye would be best at discriminating their colors. The answer—an eye with green, blue, and UV trichromacy—is exactly what bees and many other insects have. You might think that these pollinators evolved eyes that see flowers well, but that’s not what happened. Their style of trichromacy evolved hundreds of millions of years before the first flowers appeared, so the latter must have evolved to suit the former. Flowers evolved colors that ideally tickle insect eyes.
