This landscape of miniature mountains, researchers now report, acts like a surface of Velcro that pollinating bees can cling to. The feature is particularly useful when the wind starts blowing strongly.

“The bee has claws on its feet, and it can lock into the gaps between the cells,” said Beverley Glover, a botanist at the University of Cambridge in England and an author of the new study, which appears in the journal Functional Ecology.

They placed bees in cages, studying their behavior toward petunias that have the conical cells and toward mutant petunias with flatter cells.

At first the bees exhibited only a slight preference for the flowers with conical cells.

“But then we thought, flowers are on stalks and the wind sways them,” Dr. Glover said.

So to simulate the effect of wind, the researchers put the flowers on a shaking platform, and the more it shook, the more the bees appeared to prefer the conical-cell petunias.

About 20 percent of flowering plants do not have conical cells at all, and Dr. Glover would next like to study how bees and other insects engage with these flowers.

Another unanswered question: whether other hovering pollinators, like hummingbirds and moths, have similar preferences.