Sunday 1 June 2014

Plants and Bee's Communicating



I found this short David Attenborough video fascinating. It describes how plants communicate with insects, such as bees. 
Plants have an overall negative charge and bees have a positive charge this leads to the interesting and intricate interactions that occur between them. Little of this information would be known without scientific testing as what we observe with our eyes is not a full scale portrayal of the interactions occurring.
When a bee lands on a flower to eat its nectar the negatively charge pollen is attracted to the positively charged bee thus the flower gets its pollen transported to other flowers via this exceptional mechanism. What is also interesting  is that after this interaction between bee and flower has occurred the flower is left with a slightly different charge or electrical field, this charge lets other passing bee’s know that the flower has recently been visited an there probably isn’t any nectar left. By the time the plants electrical field has been stabilized it will have produced enough nectar for another bee to visit. What a fascinating connection insects and plants have and there must be so many more intricate details of their relationships that are still unexplored.  Take a look at the video!!




Here is the link if the video doesn't work- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g_q4EKecbU

1 comment:

  1. That is a superb relationship! It’s quite cool to think that an electrical charge drives this communication system. Are other pollinators also electrically charged in such a manner that they can detect a plant’s nectar stores (or is it just bees that get lucky)?

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