When you take a big sniff of a pretty flower, you are smelling the essential oils stored in its petals. In warm weather when flowers are blooming, those oils combine to produce a special scent.

The scent attracts bees and butterflies,

who act as pollinators as they help to transfer the flower’s pollen to another flower.

This is how plants reproduce!

Each kind of flower has its own specific scent to guide pollinators from one flower to another.

Once a flower has been pollinated,

it may close up so that it can start the process of making seeds for new plants.

This encourages pollinators to be drawn toward other flowers

which haven’t yet been fertilized to continue the process.