Beetles, says plant scientist Marc Gibernau, ''have relatively poor eyesight compared to bees or flies, and a good sense of smell.'' When magnolias and other early flowers developed, perhaps 95 million years ago, these ancient insects sniffed them out and pollinated them.

Even more remarkable is that certain species of plants, including some magnolias, palms, cycads, water lilies and aroids, have learned to create scents by heating up their flower parts, sending out aromas, then waiting expectantly for their insect cupids to arrive.

The aroids -- philodendrons, anthurium, spathiphyllum and arums such as the infamous Mr. Stinky at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden -- have developed a suite of smells for insects such as scarab and dung beetles and carrion flies.

Gibernau will tell how these complex interrelationships work at the annual banquet of the International Aroid Society, held in conjunction with the show and sale Saturday and Sept. 21 at Fairchild. Gibernau, who is from the French National Scientific Research Center at the University of Toulouse, France, has been studying the way such things work for a decade now.

Aroids probably first produced such volatile compounds as a defense against plant-eating insects, Gibernau says. Some of the insects, however, became flower visitors that eventually evolved into flower pollinators.

In addition to being attracted to the aromas, beetles that fly to the aroid flowers save energy by mating at night inside the warm floral chambers, Gibernau has found. By cooking up heat and aroma, some aroids can be pollinated in the dark.

So how does all of this work?

Gibernau explains that instead of producing chemical energy (called ATP) for internal biological processes, certain flower cells use an alternative process that makes heat. Usually, he says, it's male flowers that create the heat (what's new here?) but sometimes it's made in specialized sterile flowers.

To measure the temperature of the flowers, Gibernau simply puts a thermometer probe into floral tissue. Sometimes, the spadix of an aroid can be 77 degrees hotter than the air around it, he has found. That's certainly enough to warm the cockles of a beetle's heart, plus everything else.

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