ABOVE: Bees, british scientists report, adore pictures of flowers just as much as the real thing, and proved to be particular fans of Van Gogh.

This is a little too cute, but it’s Monday and we couldn’t handle seriousness in any case: British scientists announced over the weekend that honeybees prefer to fly toward, and land on, paintings of flowers instead of paintings of other things. To make it a little more surreal, the bees used in the experiment were raised in a laboratory and had never seen any flowers before, real or otherwise. Now, the BBC says that the researchers put four paintings under the flight path of their bees and tracked which ones they landed on; we’re assuming they meant four prints of paintings, since it seems more than a tad unlikely that the National Gallery would have seen fit to loan out Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) for the purposes of apian art appreciation.

The Van Gogh painting was the bees’ favourite, as the curious insects stopped to check it out 146 times and landed on it 15 times to try and suck out its sweet, sweet nectar; they soon found it was a cruel trick played by scientists with too much time on their hands. “The results show that the flower paintings have captured the essence of floral features,” Professor Lars Chittka told the Beeb, which essentially means that bees have proved—through science—what we knew all along: pictures of flowers actually do look kind of like flowers. Where’s the Nobel Prize committee?

LINK: BBC > Art-loving bees prefer Sunflowers