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
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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