Yes, and they see it well. A bee's eye carries three color receptors, tuned to blue, green, and ultraviolet. That set fixes the outer edge of what a bee can pick up, and red falls past it, so a fire-engine red bloom reads as a dark gap in the leaves. Yellow and orange land inside the range. Bees and orange flowers get along fine, which is why an orange patch can hum all morning while a red one right beside it stays quiet.
The gravel strip along my driveway bakes from noon on, and the heat comes up through your shoes. Butterfly weed grows there in a ragged orange line, and I planted two red salvia beside it to plug a hole. By nine in the morning the orange end is loud enough to hear from the mailbox. The salvia gets hummingbirds and not much else.
Bee color vision works the way yours does, just shifted down the spectrum. Each receptor answers to one band of light, and the brain builds every shade it knows out of those three signals. Your own set is tuned to red, green, and blue. Slide that window toward the short wavelengths and you get the bee version, where ultraviolet comes in and red drops out. Orange sits right beside yellow, well inside what those receptors handle, so it shows up as a solid bright target instead of a hole in the leaves. You can check this in any mixed bed. Watch which blooms the bees land on, and watch which ones they pass by.
The other two big pollinator groups have wider vision than bees do. Penn State Extension puts butterflies at 6 to 15 color receptors, depending on the species. That is the widest color range of any insect or animal, and it runs from ultraviolet all the way through red. Hummingbirds take in the whole spectrum, and most of them go for bright red, pink, and orange first, though they will feed at flowers of almost any color. Line the three groups up and orange is the overlap, the one band every one of them can use.
Orange also saves you some guessing. Blue and purple flowers work for bees, and hummingbirds will still feed at them, but red and orange are what pull the birds in first. A pure red planting sits outside what bees can see. Orange sits in the middle, so one patch does the work of two. In a small yard that can save you a whole bed, and you get bees and birds off the same few plants.
Block planting matters more here than the exact shade you pick. Butterflies are near-sighted and see only about 100 feet (30 m), so one orange plant tucked between other colors slips right past them. A wide drift of the same thing reads as a single large signal from across your yard. The same goes for flower colors for bees, since a wide patch of orange stands out against all that green far better than a lone stem does.
Do not pull the red flowers out. Hummingbirds see red and head for it first, so a few red blooms beside the orange block keep the birds coming.
Butterfly weed is the plant I would start with. It pulls in bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, moths, and specialized bees, and it blooms May through August, so your block keeps working for most of the season. Put in a group rather than one and let them grow together into a patch. That gives you one orange signal wide enough for a near-sighted butterfly and bright enough for every bee in the yard.
Read the full article: 10 Orange Flowers Worth Planting
