Bees and Flowers Harness Static Electricity to Spread Pollen

A bee hovers just above a flower, with its wings rapidly beating

Biological Strategy

Bees

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Capture, Absorb, or Filter Solids

Some living systems must secure solid particles such as sediment, usually to keep the particles from hindering their health or activity. The most common way in which they do this is through filtering. To be effective, a filtering system must be appropriate to the sizes of solid particles to be captured and must capture only what is needed. It must also be effective in the appropriate media–air, water, or sometimes solids like soil. An example is mangroves, which are trees that grow along ocean coasts. Their root system slows down and settles sediment out of the water, building up soil to support the mangrove ecosystem.

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Modify Electric Charge

Harnessing the power of electricity can be a powerful way for organisms to get energy. An electric charge can be positive or negative. When matter with an electric charge is near other charged particles, it will either be ‘repulsed’ or ‘attracted’ to the matter based on the charge. From electric eels to oriental hornets, learn about the different ways organisms use electric charges to their advantage.

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Insects

Class Insecta (“an insect”): Flies, ants, beetles, cockroaches, fleas, dragonflies

Insects are the most abundant arthropods—they make up 90% of the animals in the phylum. They’re found everywhere on earth except the deep ocean, and scientists estimate there are millions of insects not yet described. Most live on land, but many live in freshwater or saltwater marshes for part of their life cycles. Insects have three distinct body sections: a head, which has specialized mouthparts, a thorax, which has jointed legs, and an abdomen. They have well-developed nervous and sensory systems, and are the only invertebrate that can fly, thanks to their lightweight exoskeletons and small size.

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Various structures build or concentrate charge to efficiently move pollen from flowers to bees (and back).

Introduction

Bees and flowering plants share one of nature’s most elegant and essential symbiotic relationships. This relationship goes beyond the visible interactions of bees landing on flowers and emerging covered in pollen. At its core, there is an invisible yet powerful force at play: static electricity. It plays a crucial role in nourishing bees with , fertilizing plants, and providing fruit for countless other species.

The Strategy

When a bee flies through the air, it generates a positive electrostatic charge. This charge arises due to the friction between the bee and positively charged particles in the atmosphere. Flowers, on the other hand, function as part of the Earth’s surface and typically hold a slight negative charge. This charge is more concentrated at points with a small radius of curvature, such as the tips of petals, the pollen-carrying stamens, and the ovary-containing pistils of the flowers.

The bee’s ability to sense the electrical field of a flower is a key component of this strategy. As a bee approaches a flower, the difference in charge causes antennae and tiny hairs to flutter, which the bee detects as a physical sensation (interestingly, honeybees respond to the motion of their antennae, while the fuzzier bumblebees respond to sensation from the hairs).

When the bee approaches a flower, the electrical interaction becomes even more dynamic. The pollen, being negatively charged with the rest of the flower, is attracted to the positively charged bee and leaps across and sticks. When the bee visits the next blossom, some of the now positively charged pollen leaps across to the negatively charged pistil and begins the process of fertilization. This ensures an efficient transfer of pollen, critical for the plant’s reproduction, while still allowing the bee to bring plenty of pollen back to the hive for nourishment of the colony’s larvae.

The interaction doesn’t only transfer pollen. Electrons themselves move from the flower to the bee, weakening the negative charge of the flower. This effect lasted for up to 100 seconds in lab experiments. Now the electric-charge detection ability shows another value. Bees that approach during this period can detect the weaker charge of flowers which have recently yielded both pollen and electrons to another bee. This helps the bees to identify which flowers are more likely still to have plentiful nectar and pollen, optimizing their foraging efforts.

This strategy is a remarkable example of energy efficiency and resource optimization in nature. It requires no external energy inputs and relies on the inherent physical properties of the organisms involved.

The Potential

The electrostatic interaction between bees and flowers offers inspiring insights for human innovation. In agriculture, understanding and enhancing these natural electrostatic relationships could lead to more efficient pollination strategies, potentially increasing crop yields without the need for additional chemical inputs.

In the field of robotics, this concept could inform the development of biomimetic pollination drones. These drones, designed to mimic the electrostatic properties of bees, could provide supplementary pollination services in environments where natural bee populations are declining.

Understanding and applying the principles of this natural electrostatic interaction can lead to innovative, sustainable solutions in diverse fields, reminding us of the efficiency and effectiveness of strategies developed through millions of years of natural evolution.

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References

The sensory basis for e-field detection in bumble bees appears to rely on mechanosensory hairs, which are mechanically deflected by an applied electric stimulus (Sutton et al. 2016) (Fig. 1b, c). The mechanical deflection of these hairs in turn elicits neural responses, conveying information to the bee’s central nervous system.

Journal article

The bee, the flower, and the electric field: electric ecology and aerial electroreception.

Journal of Comparative Physiology A | June 24, 2017 | Clarke, D., Morley, E. & Robert, D.

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Reference

Flying insects, including pollinators like honeybees, usually possess a positive electric potential (7–10). Conversely, flowers often exhibit a negative potential (7, 11). Electric fields arising as a result of this potential difference between flowers and insects promote pollen transfer and adhesion over short distances (7, 8, 12, 13). Furthermore, these fields differ according to the pollination status of the flower, as the deposition of pollen and resulting pollination changes flower electric potential (14, 15).

Journal article

Detection and Learning of Floral Electric Fields by Bumblebees

Science | February 21, 2013 | Dominic Clarke et al. ,

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Reference

In bumblebees, the mechanical response of filiform hairs in the presence of electric fields provides key evidence for electrosensitivity to ecologically relevant electric fields. … The present work provides direct evidence for additional, nonexclusive functionality involving electrical Coulomb-force coupling between distant charged objects and mechanosensory hairs. … whereby many light thin hairs serve the detection of the electrical field surrounding a bumblebee approaching a flower. This finding prompts the possibility that other terrestrial animals use such sensory hairs to detect and respond to electric fields.

Journal article

Mechanosensory hairs in bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) detect weak electric fields

PNAS | June 28, 2016 | Gregory P. Sutton, Dominic Clarke, Erica L. Morley, and Daniel Roberta

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