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Some wildflowers have evolved characteristics such as color and nectar concentration to target specific pollinators, creating pollination syndromes. We focus on hummingbirds and bees—with an emphasis on hummingbirds—as well as plants of their respective syndromes. Despite wildflowers’ apparent evolution to cater to specific pollinators, researchers have observed bird and bee visitations to atypical plants, calling into question the effectiveness of pollination syndromes in distinguishing the bird and bee niches. This investigation uses Broad-tailed hummingbird visitation, flower color spectra, and floral nectar concentration datasets from the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) to answer the questions: How is hummingbird visitation influenced by flower color and nectar concentration? How are flower color and nectar concentration related to each other? We visualized flower spectra in tetrahedral and triangular color spaces for bird and bee vision, respectively. Our results reveal that hummingbirds prefer red-colored flowers. Color perception greatly influences hummingbird visitation, even more than nectar concentration does. In addition, we found that UV coloration and high nectar concentration successfully distinguish the bee pollination syndrome. Our results align with the previous finding that hummingbirds can effectively pollinate a wider variety of flowers than bees. We conclude that the pollination syndromes are generally effective in separating the pollinators’ niches, avoiding competition. Finally, when separating our visitation data into two year ranges (2018-2021 and 2022-2024), we noted changes in visitation frequency to certain flower species, revealing that a changing climate may alter which plants are most energetically profitable to hummingbirds.
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