Bees Can See the Electric Field of Flowers

Flowers are pretty and colorful to you and me, but to a bee, they're downright electrifying. You see, bees can sense the electric field that surrounds a flower:

Dominic Clarke and Heather Whitney from the University of Bristol have shown that bumblebees can sense the electric field that surrounds a flower. They can even learn to distinguish between fields produced by different floral shapes, or use them to work out whether a flower has been recently visited by other bees. Flowers aren’t just visual spectacles and smelly beacons. They’re also electric billboards.

Learn how a flower's electric field is actually also useful for bees as it tells them whether other bees have visited it before. Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science explains: Link


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