A young sunflower really does follow the sun. The east side of its stem grows faster by day, which tips the bud west through the afternoon, and at night the west side grows instead and swings it back to face the dark where the morning will be. It does this by an internal clock, not by watching: in a lab with the light held still, it keeps swinging for a few days anyway. Then, about when it opens, the stem stops growing and the head stays where the night left it, facing east. That turns out to be the useful direction. A study in 2016 found east-facing heads warm up sooner in the morning and get several times as many bee visits as ones turned west. So the famous sun-follower spends its youth chasing the light across the sky, and its working life simply waiting where the light will come back.