I revisit a memory every summer when I walk outside: the time I discovered my horrible fear of bees and wasps. I was six years old, sitting in my uncle’s tractor as he showed me around his farm. In my right hand, I was holding a large bouquet of fresh wildflowers I had proudly picked the same day. As I carried these vibrant flowers around, I started to notice a cluster of bees gathering around my hands. No matter how fast I moved or swung my arms, a few bees would always linger around me. At six years old, it took me a while to understand that the bees were attracted to the flowers in my hand. Although I dropped the bouquet on the ground in a desperate attempt to escape potential bee stings, the experience first showed me how fascinating a bee’s attraction to a flower can be.
A few days ago, my biology teacher shared a short video about how bees “talk” to flowers. While I used to believe bees were only drawn by the smell of nectar or the specific appearance of flower petals, there’s actually much more to it!
Introducing a flower’s electric field! Did you know that flowers are slightly negatively charged? At first, it doesn’t seem to make sense as most plants are rooted in the ground, but the air around the plants can carry a high voltage that causes a negative charge to accumulate in flower petals. Bees, on the other hand, have a positive charge. As these buzzing insects fly, the friction from bumping into tiny molecules in the air causes bees to lose electrons, thus becoming positively charged.
With the flower’s negative charge, bees are able to sense the electric field around flowers, allowing them to gauge what specific type of flower is around them and how much pollen that specific flower has. When a bee hovers around a flower, the negatively charged pollen can actually jump from the flower to the bee! Isn’t that interesting?
Even more surprising is that bees also change the charge of the flower they land on, typically neutralizing the net charge. This allows other bees to tell whether a flower has been recently visited, or if the flower has sufficient pollen. Even tiny changes in the electric field around a flower can be detected by bees! This actually helps them estimate what kind of flower they land on because different-shaped petals will conduct electricity slightly differently.
So how exactly can a bee sense an electric field? Well, no one knows for sure. However, there are many great hypotheses. One is that an electric field causes small electric forces that can push on the bees’ bodies or hairs in certain directions, allowing the bee to interpret the strength and direction of the electric field. Regardless of how bees sense an electric field, their ability to interact with negatively charged flowers is amazing.
Now when I think back to the time I sat in my uncle’s tractor, terrified at the bees gathering around my hands, I reflect on how amazing the interaction between bees and flowers is! Who knew an electric field could play such an interesting role in a simple interaction we see every day? It seems to remind me that so many simple things in our lives are more complex than we perceive them to be! There’s so much left to discover.