Mary Fisher wrote in message 407bb1e2$0$8570
Not all flowers produce nectar, bees (and other insects) are attracted to
nectar because they need the energy food - the sugars.

I'm not at all sure about fragrance but there is another attraction - which
humans can't normally experience. Some flowers (I don't know about skimmia,
I'm not a garden flower person) don't look to bees and other insects as
they
do to us. Our eyes can only detect a certain range of wave lengths, there
are others and bees etc. can 'see' (for want of a better word) colours at
the ultra-violet end of the scale (they can't 'see' colours at the infra
red
end). Under certain conditions - 'black light' is it? - these 'colours'
show
and it can clearly be seen that the patches of those colours guide the
insects directly to the base of the flower, where the nectaries are. The
nectaries are the organs which exude nectar.

I guess that on Monday it was warm, it wasn't dry and that the bush was
producing nectar.

Being attractive to insects can't be just a function of scent though
because
some flowers don't have scents. Or none that we can detect.

So saying, some plants produce 'extra floral' nectar - nothing to do with
the flowers and with no guides we know of. You will sometimes see insects -
especially social wasps - near the base of the underside of laurel leaves.
There are two small openings which exude efn - a form of sap - and how the
insects know about them I don't kno. We can smell laurel leaves even
without
crushing them, the efn is so weak that we can hardly taste it, yet the
insects flock to it.

Bees and mammals are very, very different and not only in their physiology
and natural history. They rely on different wave lengths for their sight,
they communicate by chemicals rather than noise - and probably by
vibrations
too and they are cold blooded yet need heat to function .... We can't
compare our existences in any way except that we share the planet.

I'm not preaching!

Mammals and plants and birds and reptiles are all wonderful too, every
single cell in any living creature is so complex as to be beyond our normal
understanding.
Thanks for the insight. I'm not a garden flower type either but that skimmia
scent blows your head off, and obviously the bees appreciate it too.