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POLLEN ASSIST. “The results of the model show pollen grains of masses up to and including the mass of maize pollen undergo significant electrical forces, with the strong electric field between flower and bee more influential than gravity.” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn

CHARGE AND GEOMETRY. “Simply due to their geometry, protruding floral structures such as a long stigma will create a strong local electric field (Fig. 7a, b), and indeed, flowers with a flat corolla and long stigma appear to capture more pollen through electrostatic forces than those with concave corolla and shorter stigma.” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn

GEOMETRY IS KEY. “Just as morphology, geometry and specific impedance of structures are key influences on the electric field at the scale of trees and plants (Fig. 2), this remains true at the smaller scale of a flower’s anther, stigma, and pollen grain.” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn

POLLEN FUNCTION. “During the bee’s final approach to the flower, electrostatic forces between these two bodies grow rapidly larger (Fig. 5). This has been suggested to have important consequences for pollen transfer from anther to bee and back from bee to stigma.” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn

LANDING GUIDES. “At a distance of 2–3 cm shown in Fig. 4, the region between the bee and the flower has an electric field of over 5 kV/m. This is comparable in magnitude to the electric field at the ground under a high-voltage power line. This field strength is much higher than that required to elicit mechanical and neural responses from bumble bee hairs.” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn

LOCAL FIELDS. “The bee carries a positive charge that it acquires while flying. The flower gains a negative charge through electrostatic induction. The forces that exist between charges fall off with the square of their distance, so that the forces between bee and flower increase quickly as the bee approaches.” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn

INVISIBLE WORLD. “The tripartite interactions between bees, flowers, and the electric field that exist all around them, reveal thus far underappreciated physical and sensory ecologies. These interactions are likely to be diverse and maybe ubiquitous among insects since all are subject to the laws that govern the force of electromagnetism.” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn

CONFOUNDERS. “High humidity, for example, leads to the formation of moist films on surfaces which prevent charge build up, and a dense rainforest canopy acts like a Faraday cage, negating the influence of the atmospheric electric field at ground level, possibly preventing the formation of floral electric fields altogether.” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn

NEW FIELD. “As a recently defined field, there is still a vast amount that is unknown in the electrical ecology of pollination, each from the perspectives of the bee the flower and the electric field.” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn

OLD LINKS. “Electrostatics and electroreception are likely to be a bona fide part of the multiple co-evolutionary adaptations between plants and their pollinators.” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn