WASHINGTON, D.C. ? Bumblebees like their nectar hot and can use floral color as a way to find it, according to a report published this week.

“What the bees appear to be doing is a bit like us drinking a hot drink on a cold day,” said the research group’s leader, Lars Chittka, a behavioral ecologist at the University of London.

“The interesting thing is that bees don’t just prefer the warmer drinks – they learn to predict the flower temperature from the flower color,” he said of the study published in the journal Nature.

The researchers presented bumblebees with artificial flowers that all contained the same amount of sugar water.

Pink flowers were heated to about 69 degrees and purple flowers to about 84 degrees. The bees showed a significant preference for the warmer purple flowers. When the temperatures were switched, the bees favored the pink flowers.

The researchers then selected one color for all the flowers but heated them to different temperatures. The bees failed to consistently find the warmest flowers.

The result suggested that the bees relied on color, and not some other heat-sensing method, to learn which flowers were the warmest.