While bees carry out fewer total flower visits than other pollinators, they are responsible for about half of all crop pollination (Rader et al. The diversity of animal pollinators, and the variety of pollination syndromes, is vast (for a comprehensive review, see Willmer 2011). 2012) and even using acoustics, as some bats use floral echoes to localize nectar resources (Simon et al. Some plants can signal to their pollinators using corolla air humidity (von Arx et al.
This article also aims at highlighting areas in need of further investigation, where more research is required to better understand the mechanisms of electrostatic interactions and aerial electroreception.Īnimal pollinators detect and select flowers by their colours, shapes, patterns, fragrant volatiles (Raguso 2008), and, in some cases, temperature (Rands and Whitney 2008) and tactile cues (Kevan and Lane 1985). Focussing on pollen transfer, we deconstruct some of the salient features of the three ingredients that enable electrostatic interactions, namely the atmospheric electric field, the capacity of bees to accumulate positive charge, and the propensity of plants to be relatively negatively charged. Finite-element modelling and experimental evidence offer new insights into how these interactions are organised and how they can be further studied. Here, we present our latest understanding of how these electric interactions arise and how they contribute to pollination and electroreception. Recently, another sensory modality has been unveiled the detection of the weak electrostatic field that arises between a flower and a bee.
From the sensory ecological viewpoint, bee–flower interactions rely on senses such as vision, olfaction, humidity sensing, and touch. Flowers and bees evolved traits that enable pollination, a process that is as important to plants as it is for pollinating insects. Bees and flowering plants have a long-standing and remarkable co-evolutionary history.
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