How Does a Bee Choose a Flower? 🌼🐝

Sleep Tight Science - A Bedtime Science Podcast For Kids

This episode explores the fascinating science behind how bumblebees navigate their environment to find flowers. It specifically addresses a

Key takeaways

• Bumblebees use vision to approach flowers in stages rather than a smooth descent.
• Flowers maintain tiny electric fields that change when a bee lands on them.
• Bees accumulate a small positive electric charge while flying through the air.
• Tiny sensory hairs on a bee's body detect movement caused by electrical fields.
• University of Bristol researchers proved bees use electricity by using artificial flowers with different signals.

Main topics

• Bumblebee landing mechanics
• Electrostatic sensing in insects
• Pollination processes

Notable quotes

A bumblebee can sense the tiny electric field around a flower without even touching it.

Conclusion

Listeners are left with a deeper appreciation for the invisible scient

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) You're listening to Sleep Tight Science. Did you know that a bumblebee can sense the tiny electric field around a flower without even touching it? What? And when another bee visits that flower, the electric field changes. Speaker 1 (0:40) Hello, friends, and welcome back to Sleep Tight Science, a bedtime podcast that answers your questions about science. This episode's question comes from Ava, who is five and lives in Hamilton, Ontario. Ava wanted to know how bumblebees can land on flowers. Speaker 1 (1:06) It's a really interesting question, and it's something you can watch for yourself, just like Ava did, whenever you're outside where bees are active. But as we started looking through our books and searching for answers, we came across something we hadn't thought about before. Scientists have studied how bumblebees land, but they've also studied what happens just before that. Before a bee can land on a flower, it has to choose which flower to visit. That discovery actually led us somewhere new, which is something you may realize. When you start learning about one thing, you may learn something completely unexpected as a bonus. Speaker 1 (2:00) Anyway, it turns out that flowers have tiny electric fields around them, and bumblebees can sense them. Here's a short answer to that discovery, just in case your eyes are getting heavy and you are ready to fall asleep and don't want to miss out. As a bumblebee flies, it builds up a tiny electric charge. Flowers have electrical fields too, and when a bee lands on one, that field changes for a short time. Bumblebees can sense these fields using tiny hairs on their bodies. Scientists think this electrical information may be one of the clues bees use when deciding which flowers to visit. Speaker 1 (2:58) We'll find out how scientists discovered that bees could sense something like that at all, and what the tiny hairs on a bee's body have to do with it. And, don't worry, we will answer Ava's original question too. Here are a few words to listen for. Charge. A small amount of electricity that something is carrying. Speaker 1 (3:27) Pollinator. An animal that moves pollen from flower to flower, helping plants grow seeds and fruit. Sense. To notice or detect something. The way your nose senses a smell or your skin senses cold. Thank you to Axel, six years old, from Maple Ridge, British Columbia, for introducing our show. Take a slow, deep breath in. Speaker 1 (4:04) And let's get started. Let's start with the bee itself. A bumblebee is round and fuzzy, more like a flying pom-pom than the sleek striped honeybee you might picture. That fuzz has an important purpose. It helps the bee hold on to heat, which is important because bumblebees need their flight muscles to be warm enough to work. They can even warm those muscles before taking off, a little like shivering without actually flying anywhere. And as promised, before we go into any more detail, I want to make sure we actually answer the question Ava asked in the first place. How does a bumblebee land on a flower? Its eyes help. Speaker 1 (5:17) As a bumblebee gets closer to a flower, the flower appears to get bigger and bigger in its view. The bee uses that changing picture to control how quickly it approaches. Scientists studying thousands of bumblebee landings found that they don't simply slow down