It was May, 2000. "I found an article saying honeybees are gathering around an orchid." said Mr. Nomura, the office manager at the high school that I worked for then.
"That's right." I said. "It could happen in city areas, several cases every year in this time of year. The owner of the orchid must've been surprised."
I looked at the newspaper article with a black-and-white photograph(3cm×3cm). It was swarmed honeybees gathering around an orchid. And when I saw the orchid in the photo, I was stunned. The leaves stood straight, flower stalks were longer and flowers were bigger. It was not KINRYOUHEN. It was different from the ones that I had been familiar with.
"It could be a great discovery!" I excited. Indeed, if it is true that honeybees gather around an orchid other than KINRYOUHENS. I immediately bought a book on orchids (Cymbidium) and looked through it while I tried to make contact with Mr. Shigyo, who had taken the photograph. He was kind enough to show me the original photo and to give me one of the same orchids. He didn't know the name of the orchid.
Now I have got some knowledge of orchids through studying them. That is, many of orchids available from flower shops are hybrids. KINRYOUHEN have been used as a parent of crossbreeding since prewar days dating back to 1930's. And they made a hybrid named OOISO.
Then I made a plan to study whether hybrids of KINRYOUHEN attract honeybees or not. I got some hybrids from orchid fanciers, the National Agricultural Experiment Stations and orchid gardens. I particularly thank for Mr. Takei (Chiba Prefecture), Mr. Yamagami (Tokusima Prefecture) and Mr. Kojima (Takagi Farm, Hiroshima Prefecture). I took ten flowers from the hybrids respectively, and examined whether each of them attracts honeybees or not by the same method when I had done with KINRYOUHEN. The results are shown in the table below. It says that MISS MUFFET especially attracts honeybees. And Mr. Shigyo's orchid has turned out to be OOISO-A, a hybrid of OOISO. From the results, many hybrids of KINRYOUHEN attract honeybees although some are stronger than the others.

Hybrids	Attraction for bees
OOISO A	+ + +
OOISO B	+ + +
SAZANAMI・CHAMPION	+
SAZANAMI・HARUNOUMI	-
MISS・MUFFET	+ + + +
SARAH JEAN・ICE CASCADE	+
SARAH JEAN・KOIHIME	+
KENNY・WINE COLOR	+ +
SWEETHEART	-
TOM THUMB	+ +
KINRYOUHEN	+ + + +

OOISO A
OOISO B
TOM THUMB

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