Pollination 2: Electric Buzz-aloo Biological senses are one of my favorite things to learn and think about. From your answers on this post, it sounds like many of you are just as fascinated with them as I am. Our reality consists only of what our five limited senses tell us about the world. We can build tools to convert what we can’t sense into something that we can, but we’ll always be limited by our basic set of tools. That’s why it blows my mind to find out things like bees can sense electric fields when looking for flowers! For half a century, it’s been known that flowers have a negative charge and bees tend to have a positive charge. This is because flowers are “grounded” (literally) and bees build up a sort of static buzz while flying through the air. Why might that be beneficial to flowers? It helps all those pollen particles jump from flower to be to aid the pollination process! Daniel Robert from the University of Bristol just recently teamed up with a physicist and a botanist to find out whether bees are actually sensing that electricity. They created several shapes of synthetic flowers that they could control the electrical charges of. Bees quickly learned to visit charged/sweet fake flowers over uncharged/bitter fake flowers. This matches what may happen in the wild, since after a bee visits a flower, it takes away not only its nectar, but also some of its zap! If you visit twice, you’re wasting your bee time. Bees are also able to see things about flower colors that are invisible to us, like using ultraviolet light to see a “bulls-eye” to guide them in:  Want more? Ed Yong has a great, detailed write-up of the electric bees at Phenomena.
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Pollination 2: Electric Buzz-aloo

Biological senses are one of my favorite things to learn and think about. From your answers on this post, it sounds like many of you are just as fascinated with them as I am. Our reality consists only of what our five limited senses tell us about the world. We can build tools to convert what we can’t sense into something that we can, but we’ll always be limited by our basic set of tools. That’s why it blows my mind to find out things like bees can sense electric fields when looking for flowers!

For half a century, it’s been known that flowers have a negative charge and bees tend to have a positive charge. This is because flowers are “grounded” (literally) and bees build up a sort of static buzz while flying through the air. Why might that be beneficial to flowers? It helps all those pollen particles jump from flower to be to aid the pollination process!

Daniel Robert from the University of Bristol just recently teamed up with a physicist and a botanist to find out whether bees are actually sensing that electricity. They created several shapes of synthetic flowers that they could control the electrical charges of. Bees quickly learned to visit charged/sweet fake flowers over uncharged/bitter fake flowers. This matches what may happen in the wild, since after a bee visits a flower, it takes away not only its nectar, but also some of its zap! If you visit twice, you’re wasting your bee time.

Bees are also able to see things about flower colors that are invisible to us, like using ultraviolet light to see a “bulls-eye” to guide them in: 

Want more? Ed Yong has a great, detailed write-up of the electric bees at Phenomena.

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    This is the bee’s knees.
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