Scientists have discovered yet another way that flowers attract bees: they use electric fields.
"It turns out flowers have a slight negative charge relative to the air around them. Bumblebees have a charge, too," says National Public Radio.
"When bees are flying through the air, just the friction of the air and the friction of the body parts on one another causes the bee to become positively charged," says Gregory Sutton of the University of Bristol.
The two opposite charges attract, helping the bees locate flowers.
In a study published in the journal Science, the authors arranged a field of artificial flowers with electric charges.
"Electric flowers with a positive charge offered a sucrose reward while those without offered a bitter quinine solution," writes the BBC.
"Bumblebees were allowed 50 visits in the flying arena and the last 10 visits showed the bees had learnt to tell the difference between the flowers. When the electric field was turned off, 'the bee goes back to selecting at random because it hasn't got a way to tell the difference between them any more,'" said lead author Dominic Clarke, speaking to the BBC.
"That's how we know it was the electric field that they were learning."
In addition, scientists found that real flowers visited by bees changed their electric fields. The change lasted for about 100 seconds after the bee left, acting as an indicator to other bees that that flower's pollen had just been harvested.
"Animals are just constantly surprising us as to how good their senses are," said Clarke. "More and more we're starting to see that nature's senses are almost as good as they could possibly be."
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