Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds (1871) is an oil on mahogany panel picture by Martin Johnson Heade acquired by the National Gallery of Art in 1982. Inspired perhaps by the works of Charles Darwin and Frederic Edwin Church, Heade planned to produce a deluxe book in the 1860s depicting Brazilian hummingbirds in tropical settings, and, to that end, created a series of 40 small pictures called "The Gems of Brazil". The project was abandoned, but Heade retained his interest in hummingbirds and continued to paint them in combination with orchids and jungle backgrounds through the
Flower constancy food resources and so will feed on a mixture of these to maximize their energy intake per unit time. As a result of this apparent contradiction, many hypotheses have been proposed to explain flower constancy in insects to determine the adaptability of flower constancy. One of the most popular explanations is that insects that are flower constant have limited memory space and can only focus on one flower type at a time. Insects, as with other animals, have short-term memory (STM) or "working memory" where information is stored temporarily for a few second or minutes. Additionally, insects have long-term memory