Category: Uncategorized

THE PATHWAY. “The mechanical deflection of these hairs in turn elicits neural responses, conveying information to the bee’s central nervous system.” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn

SPECIAL HAIRS. “Bumble bees can sense the presence of weak electric fields (e-fields) surrounding flowers, and discriminate between e-fields with different radial geometries. The sensory basis for e-field detection in bumble bees appears to rely on mechanosensory hairs, which are mechanically deflected by an applied electric stimulus (Fig. 1b, c).” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn

WEAK ELECTRIC FIELDS. “Bumble bees, Bombus terrestris and honey bees, Apis mellifera have been shown capable of detecting weak electric fields, each in different behavioural contexts, using different sensory mechanisms.” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn

NEW SENSES. “For terrestrial animals residing in air, an electrically resistive medium, detection of electric fields must operate differently and constitute a new sensory capacity.” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn

AQUATIC FORMS. “In aquatic animals, electroreception relies on direct transmission of stimulus from the conductive medium (water) to the nervous system, via conductive receptor channels (ampullae of Lorenzini).” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn

CHARGE LANGUAGE. “It is also crucial to intraspecific electrical communication in honey bees; the dancing bee must be charged to convey electrical signals to fellow bees within the hive. A bee’s bulk charge will also induce stronger electrical interactions between itself and any flower it visits, strengthening electrostatic forces on pollen. The mechanism by which bees gain their charge, however, is not well understood.” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn

“ELECTRORECEPTION, defined as the ability of an organism to detect external electric forces, has long been known in animals living in aquatic, electrically conductive environments, for example, in fish, in amphibians, and in platypus.” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn

TWO CHARGE SOURCES. “Bees are not electrically connected to the earth, like flowers are, yet they also gain a charge as they fly through the air. The acquisition and maintenance of charge on a bee is a key factor in their ability to detect electric fields, with just slight increases in charge causing large gains in electromechanical sensitivity of both hairs and antennae.” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn

A NEW DIMENSION. “Here, we present an aspect of plant–pollinator interactions that has been underappreciated thus far: the presence of electrostatic forces between bees and flowers.” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn

THE ZONE. “At the scale of the flower, we name the local distortions in background e-field around a flower, the “floral electric field”. This is the scale at which bees are acting and interacting.” https://lnkd.in/dz2UJCDk View in LinkedIn