Bee fuzz often appeared in English nursery rhymes because it rhymed with another characteristic of bees: their buzz.
Entomologists also often relied on fuzz to identify and describe the bees they studied. A single glance at the fuzz covering their bodies was enough to distinguish bees from wasps.
For example, Shakespeare once wrote in Troilus and Cressida: "The singing masons building roofs of gold, the civil citizens kneading up the honey, the poor mechanic porters crowding in their heavy burdens at his narrow gate."
Almost everyone recognized those plump, gentle bumblebees. They lived on every continent except Antarctica, Oceania, and parts of Africa, survived in any weather that was not too harsh, and pollinated many kinds of plants.
There was a large group of orchids called Bee Orchids, widely distributed across Europe, North Africa, and West Asia. These flowers looked remarkably like bees and were covered in fuzz, appearing like furry female bumblebees.
They grew this way to attract male bumblebees to pollinate them. Some not only looked alike, but also secreted a scent highly similar to that of female bumblebees. To young male bumblebees just awakening to desire, those swaying Bee Orchids were simply flamboyantly beautiful females. So they flew toward the Bee Orchids without hesitation and tried to mate with the flowers.
If the Bee Orchids were successfully pollinated, they stopped secreting their scent. By then, the female bees had also hatched. If the male bees had not died by that point, they could continue reproducing.
This competition ended in the orchids' overwhelming victory through evasive evolution. The orchids had no concern whatsoever for mutual benefit; after all, if these bumblebees died, new ones would hatch the following year. In this contest, plants defeated insects so thoroughly that the insects had no ability to fight back, becoming tools