Bees can sense—and learn from—the electric fields of flowers

My, what delicious electrons.

NASA

Flowers offer all sorts of cues to their pollinators—colors, patterns, shapes, and scents all help plants communicate with butterflies, bats, birds, and bees. But recent research suggests that another type of information—electrical fields—may work in concert with these other cues to provide extremely nuanced details about pollination status. This week in the journal Science, researchers show that this may play an important role in the extremely close-knit relationship between flowers and their pollinators.

As they travel through the air, bumblebees lose electrons, accumulating a small positive electrical charge. Flowers, meanwhile, are generally negatively charged at the top, thanks to a slight positive charge in the air around them. As a bee approaches a flower, a tiny electric field is created between plant and pollinator.

In the past, scientists have suggested that these differing charges encourage the transfer of pollen between flower and bee, helping the tiny pollen grains “jump” onto the pollinator. However, the new study showed that the bee’s landing actually influences the flower’s electrical charge—increasing it slightly—for a short period of time. The study's authors hypothesize that this change may signal to the next bee that the flower has just been visited and that its nectar stash is depleted. Other cues, such as a flower’s shape or color, sometimes change in response to a bee’s visit, but these changes can take hours. The electrical field, on the other hand, changes almost instantaneously, providing a nearly immediate signal to incoming bees.