The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Darwin and Evolutionary Thought

Bumblebees, insisted a writer signing himself Ruricola (1841) in the Gardeners’ Chronicle, wrought terrible damage on bean crops by rapaciously drilling holes in the bean flowers in search of nectar. Ruricola advised gardeners to protect their crops from these costly acts of vandalism by eradicating bees’ nests as soon as bean flowers bloomed. Charles Darwin (1841) responded four weeks later with a vigorous, if qualified, defense of the bees, “these industrious, happy-looking creatures.” The boring did little material damage to the flower, he insisted. The bees’ activity perhaps did the plants an injury nonetheless, but in a more indirect, perfidious way than Ruricola imagined. The plants offered nectar to the bees in exchange for transferring pollen from flower to flower. The bees, by lapping up their reward without earning it by brushing over the reproductive parts of the flower, were in effect “picking pockets.”

This short communication, written in the summer of 1841, was Darwin’s first public remarks on a defining passion of his life. Over the next forty years he published numerous articles and books on the complex relationship between the reproductive organization of flowering plants and their environment. After the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 he promoted evolution as the unifying principle behind his botanical breakthroughs. The German botanist Hermann Müller (1879, 2), one of many naturalists who built a career advancing Darwin’s approach, declared that this marriage of evolution and botany provided “the key to the solution of the riddle of the flower.” This solution was not, of course, on offer in his response to Ruricola. But in this modest communication, so seemingly inconsequential when laid next to the panoramic generalizations of the Origin, we discover the epitome of Darwin’s scientific character.