Our discovery was made somewhere between the wheelie bins and the fire assembly point. Orchid hunters are famed for their passion, for their determination to travel to the ends of the earth; but we had just come out of Cookies Café, near York University’s music department, and were not actually hunting for anything: my son was here on work experience. “Bee orchids,” he said, halting abruptly at a small colony of foot-high plants. I nodded. “Bee orchids.” Neither of us had ever seen them in the wild before, but what else could they be? Each flower looked exactly like a bumblebee: pink sepals for wings, green leaves for antennae and a velveteen brown body. Are the university scholars aware of the deception going on under their noses? For bee orchids not