Concept: Floral electric fields, bumblebee multimodal cues
Source: A (original research) Report in Science (April 5, 2013).
- Background: Already known that flowers often exhibit negative field potential versus pollinators’ positive field potential. Also, that multimodal floral cues enhance foraging efficiency and pollination. Also that bees transfer information back to the plant for later visitors, in the mode of scent, colour, and humidity.
- Experiment: Measured bee charge, transfer of charge between bee and plant (occurs at milliseconds-to-seconds, nb. this is faster than other modes, eg. colour, humidity, scent, that occur at seconds-to-hours), ability of bees to discriminate flowers based on charge, pattern of charge on flowers, ability of bees to discriminate charge patterns, improved ability of bees to discriminate colour plus charge pattern.
- Future research: Into importance of this fastest mode of information transfer from bee to plant. And, into information that can be carried by electric field patterns.
