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Bees And The Floral Internet: Charge Is Everything

Bee’s wings beat so fast they pick up static electricity as they fly. This female American bumblebee has not only collected nectar and milkweed pollen that can be seen on her legs; she has also added an invisible positive static charge to the flowers she is leaving. That charge can be detected by other browsing bees. To them, it means there is no useable food here, pick an uncharged flower head. As the charge gradually wears off, the flower produces more nectar. Sensing no charge, bees will come to feed, deposit pollen, and cross-pollinate the flower to make seeds.

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Biologists have known for a long time that bees, especially bumblebees, build up a static electric charge as they fly. Wings beating at 200 plus times per second pick up electrons from the air, producing more than a 100-volt positively-charged insect. Plants in their turn were found to have negative or neutral – charged flowers. Since opposite charges attract, they’ve been pretty sure this helps the hairs on the pollinator bodies to “stand on end” and pull pollen from flowers while distributing the discharge like thousands of tiny lightning rods.

While doing Bees and Wasps of Texas photography, Paul has to figure out where to point and focus his camera to get portraits of fast-flying creatures. It gradually dawned on him that if a bumble bee had recently fed on a flower, others would pass that blossom by and go to other flowers instead. The moral is, point where they aren’t. But, how did they know there was no nectar there with no visible full or empty signs?

What’s new?

Recent research has reported there are other aspects to the electrically charged insect equation.

First, it was established that bees can sense the electrical fields of flowers.

Second, botanists found that different plant species carry different charges, acting as an attractant like flower color, aroma, texture, etc., to entice a particular pollinator co-adapted to the plant.

Some plants were found to change their static signature, indicating flower maturity and readiness for pollination. This charge, although no one has tested it yet, could partially explain flower constancy – the propensity for bees to visit only one type of flower each foraging trip, making them top-pollinators in the insect world,

British biologists discovered a new twist in charged/discharged pattern for flowers that may help Paul understand why his taking pictures can be difficult at times.

When a bumble bee visited a flower and drank the nectar they found, they not only picked up pollen but they charged the flower. Other bees approaching the flower were proved to sense that positive charge, avoid the bloom, and give preference to negative-or-neutral-charged flowers, possessing nectar to share.

Thus, while the movement of bees from bloom to bloom may appear to be random, it’s not. The bee-flower symbiosis makes feeding and transferring pollen more efficient for the bees. They do not have to waste time and energy checking empty flowers.

In turn, the plants’ genetic diversity is enhanced as it is more likely to be cross-pollinated by bees carrying pollen from a nearby plant of the same species. And, as the flower produces more nectar, it gradually is grounded electrically, losing its positive charge, again signaling to potential pollinators the flower’s ability to feed a bee carrying the pollen it needs for reproduction to occur.

The bad news on charged bees

As with most adaptations, there is always somebody around to take advantage of it.

In the case of electrically-charged insects, it’s a predator, orb web spiders. Those big guys with the large circular webs hanging between trees or bushes hope unsuspecting insects will fly into their web and be ensnared.

Since opposite-charged objects attract, spiders evolved to produce webs that are negatively-charged. As a positively-charged insect approaches the web, web filaments are attracted and the web bows out to touch and capture food for the spider. Good for the spider, not so for the bee.

We know that spiders use vibrations in their webs caused by trapped critters to locate where they are. Do they also sense the change in electrical potential as a trapped bee shares its positive charge with the web? We don’t know. Finding that out will be up to some evolutionary biologist specializing in arachnology.

Sources: “Electroreception may help pollinators to guess where others have already fed on nectar,” Matt Kaplan, Nature magazine, Feb. 21, 2013; “The Electrifying Buzz Of Bees”, Daniel Rozen, Journal of Experimental Biology 2013 216: iv doi: 10.1242/jeb.077909; “Detection and Learning of Floral Electric Fields by Bumblebees,” Dominic Clarke, et. al., Science 5 April 2013: Vol. 340 no. 6128 pp. 66-69 DOI: 10.1126/science.1230883.


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