Fig. 5: Ecological functions of short trichomes and long hairs in Nigella damascena.

a–i The visiting behaviors of bumblebees on wild-type (a–e, petals with short trichomes and long hairs), TRV2-NidaMYB5-1- (f, g, petals with only long hairs) and TRV2-NidaTT8-NidaGL3- (h, i, petals lacking both short trichomes and long hairs) treated flowers. Movie frames showing the moments before (b), during (c), and after (d) the bumblebee foraged for nectar in a petal. The yellow arrow indicates the entrance to the petal nectary. The purple arrow indicates the proboscis of the bumblebee. Illustrations showing the accessibility of bumblebees to nectar in different petals (e, g, i). ms: millisecond. See Supplementary Movies 1–3 for details. j, k Percentages of petals opened by naive (j) and experienced (k) bumblebees in wild-type and VIGS-treated flowers. l, m Foraging times of naive (l) and experienced (m) bumblebees on wild-type and VIGS-treated flowers. In (j–m), the box is bounded by the first and third quartiles with a horizontal line at the median, and whiskers extend to the minimum and maximum values. ^**P < 0.01, ^***P < 0.001, n.s., not significant (Kruskal-Wallis test). Each experimental group comprised 21 independent replicates, each involving one bumblebee and one flower. Source data for (j–m) are provided in Supplementary Data 4.