The Hidden Language Between Flowers and Bees

In short, the team discovered that bumblebees can sense a flower’s electrical field, distinguish between fields formed by different floral shapes, and tell whether another bee recently visited a flower.

See, both flowers and bees have electrical fields. As they fly, bees bump into charged particles, such as dust and other small molecules. The friction of these tiny collisions knocks electrons off the bee’s surface, leaving them with a positive charge.

Meanwhile, flowers usually have a negative charge, particularly during mild weather. A plant’s roots in the ground give it a slight negative electric charge. The higher the plant grows, the higher the electric charge it has because the air around the plant also has an electric charge that increases every meter above the ground. This creates a faint electric field around the plant.

Now for the fun part.

One interesting observation is that pollen will hop from the flower to the bee when a positively charged bee approaches the negatively charged flower. Robert told National Geographic:

“We found some videos showing that pollen literally jumps from the flower to the bee, as the bee approaches… even before it has landed.”

Further, the positively charged bees slightly increase the charge of any flower they land on beginning just before landing and lasts for just shy of two minutes — much longer than a bee usually spends visiting a flower. The team demonstrated that when a bee lands on the stem of a petunia, its electrical potential increases by approximately 25 millivolts.

Bees sense this slight change in a flower’s electrical field, which communicates that the flower has recently been visited and is likely low on nectar. It’s sort of like the flower is telling the bee, “I’m out of stock. Check back later.” Meanwhile, when a bee makes contact with a flower, it cancels out the single — which tells other bees, “I’m occupied.”

No one knows for sure how bees actually sense electrical fields. But Robert and others believe the electric fields affect part of a bee, like its antennas or the tiny hairs on its body. 

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One of the best things about this knowledge is that you don’t have to travel or book a vacation to see it. From now on, you’ll know the miraculous interaction happens anytime you see a bee and flower interacting. You can watch the interaction and know there is an exchange between these two vastly different species, one we humans can only observe and not experience.

Not only does this knowledge make previous mundane observations more magical, but it’s also a humbling reminder that as brilliant as the human species can be, other animals experience the world wholly differently than we do and are capable of doing things we may never fully understand.

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