Pollination of Yellow fringed orchid by Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly

We had just stopped the truck on a forest service road in the Pisgah National Forest, near Brevard, North Carolina when we saw a pipevine swallowtail butterfly showing really intense interest in the flowers of a yellow fringed orchid plant. We grabbed our cameras, jumped out of the truck and raced to the flower, but in doing so, we scared it away. However, these butterflies have a short memory, and in no time it was back to finish probing the flowers for nectar.

Here's how pollination works for this combination of flower and butterfly:

The butterfly finds the flowers and lands on one of them. It attaches its feet to the flower parts and sticks it proboscis (tongue) into the flower's long nectar tube. The nectar is at the bottom of the exceedingly thin tube, so that no other prospective pollinators but butterflies can reach the sweet nectar.

In order to get the last drop, the butterfly has to stick his head into the flower, thereby touching its head against the sticky pads on the tips of the pair of pollinia set on either side of the nectar tube. When it pulls out, the pollinia are firmly attached directly below those huge butterfly eyes! It doesn't appear to be painful or even annyoing to the butterfly, because it spends no time trying to scrape them off.

When it visits the next flower for more nectar, the pollinia are naturally positioned to brush against the stigma (female part) of the flower, thereby completing the act of pollination. Sometimes, in the process, the butterfly will pick up another set of pollinia -- soon it will look like it is sprouting yellow horns on the front of its face!

I'm always interested in the different pollination mechanisms that orchid flowers employ. This one was fun to watch, and I'm certainly glad that we were at the right time and the right place to capture its beauty...