Bumblebees are really good at picking up on cues from flowers, even electrical signals.
found that foraging bumblebees change a flower’s electric field for about 1 to 2 minutes. The study authors suggested that even this short change might be detectable by other passerby bees, informing them the flower was recently visited—and has less nectar and pollen to offer.—the flow of charge produced by or occurring within living organisms. But electric fields are a dynamic phenomenon, explains Hunting.
First, to assess bumblebee foraging behavior, Hunting and his colleagues set up an experiment in a rural field site at the University of Bristol campus using two potted lavender plants. They sprayed a commercially available fertilizer mixture on one of the potted plants while spraying the other with demineralized water. Then, the team watched as bumblebees bypassed the fertilizer-covered lavender.
Hunting suggests that the plant’s defense mechanism might be at the root of the electrical change. “What actually happens if you apply chemicals to plant cells, it triggers a chemical stress response in the plant, similar to a wounding response,” he explains. The plant sends metabolites—which have ionic charge—to start to fix the tissue. This flux of ions generates an electric current, which the bees detect.
“Ideally, you would apply fertilizer to the soil [instead of spraying directly on the plant],” Hunting says. But that would require more labor than the approach used by many in US agriculture, in which airplanes spray massive fields.Essenberg says that luckily the electric field changes are relatively short lived, making it a bit easier for farmers to find workarounds.
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