It’s late February. The blooming of the marigolds, petunias, pansies, and sunflowers on the campus has announced the advent of spring. Every time I go for a walk on the campus, which, weirdly enough, is quite often, I can be sure to find at least a few people honing their photography skills, using the flowers as their subjects. Yours truly can often be found as a part of this ambitious lot.

Looking at the flowers, you’d be remiss not to notice the bees. Sitting on the grass lawn outside my hostel the other day, I found myself a silent beholder to a bunch of bees having their lunch on the marigolds. It got me thinking about this simple yet remarkable symbiosis between bees and flowers. Here’s the simple part: The flower provides food to the bees in the form of nectar, and the bees on the other hand act as pollinators to aid the flower’s reproduction. Now for the remarkable part: This process involves, among other things, the interaction of electric fields between bees and flowers!

It’s no secret that flowers use a variety of cues to attract pollinators, from fragrance and vibrant colors to changes in local air humidity. In 2013, researchers from the University of Bristol found a new type of floral cue: Electric field.

Most flying insects (including bees) generally carry a positive charge. This is due to their frequent collisions with charged particles in the air, which divests them of their surface electrons. By comparison, flowers generally have a negative potential, and what’s more, this potential can vary with the pollination status of the flower. Bees can sense this potential of the flowers, just like they sense other cues like color and smell. As the bee approaches the flower, charge transfer occurs between the bee and the flower before it has even landed. This changed field of the flower stays changed for a couple of minutes after the bee has left, thus signaling the other pollinators that it is currently “out of stock”. Once its nectar stores get filled up again, it’s back in business as usual. Honestly, as an introvert, this makes me wish I had a similar sort of cue that would tell people when I’m drained of my social battery and don’t want to be approached or talked to. Anyways, back to the bees. In the process of the bee sitting and drinking nectar from the flower, the pollen gets stuck to the tiny hair on the bee’s body. It carries this pollen to the next flower where it detaches from the bee’s body, thus completing its role in the flower’s reproduction.

But why am I telling you all this? (Well, other than the fact that I want to increase my readership)

To me, this is a fascinating example of communication and mutualism in nature. And once you get to exploring, you’ll quickly find that this is just one among thousands such examples. It is imperative, now more than ever, that we make an effort to learn about the natural world, and be captivated by it. Because unless we understand the web of nature, how each strand connects to the other, and how we humans are threatening the rupture of these strands, we won’t make a conscious effort to evaluate the consequences of our actions.

Take the bees for example. They’re responsible for pollinating around 85% of all cultivated land in the world, which includes over 50 million hectares of cultivated land in India. It is sometimes said that every third bite of food that we eat depends on a bee. And yet, across the world, bee populations have been on a declining trend since the late 20th century. In India, a study conducted in Odisha revealed that except Apis dorsata (rock bee), four other species of bees – including Apis cerana, Apis florea, Amegilla spp, and Xylocopa spp – have experienced a decline of up to 70 – 90% in the last 15 – 25 years. The culprits? Climate change, aggressive use of chemical pesticides, use of certain GM crops, habitat destruction, and….well, you get the point.

This is why I started this blog. To ignite your fascination with the natural world, and to start conversations on what mankind is doing wrong and what we can do right to still preserve what we’ve been so graciously given. To acknowledge ourselves as a part of nature, not owners of it.

I will see you soon with another wild story.

Until then, be curious, stay kind.

References:

1. Clarke, D., Whitney, H., Sutton, G., & Robert, D. (2013). Detection and learning of floral electric fields by bumblebees. Science, 340(6128), 66-69.
2. Zattara, E. E., & Aizen, M. A. (2021). Worldwide occurrence records suggest a global decline in bee species richness. One Earth, 4(1), 114-123.
3. Smith, B. M., Chakrabarti, P., Chatterjee, A., Chatterjee, S., Dey, U. K., Dicks, L. V., … & Basu, P. (2017). Collating and validating indigenous and local knowledge to apply multiple knowledge systems to an environmental challenge: A case-study of pollinators in India. Biological conservation, 211, 20-28.
4. Bees Can Sense the Electric Fields of Flowers
5. To protect India’s bees, we need to understand their impact on agricultural practices