A bee approaches a flower’s electric fieldUNIVERSITY OF BRISTOLBees use electric fields to help home in on flowers, but the mechanism by which the insects do so was a mystery. To find out, scientists used lasers to determine whether the antennae or tiny hairs on the bodies of bumblebees moved in response to an electric field. While both structures were deflected in the field, only the hairs produced neural activity, suggesting the latter may be responsible for the insects’ electric sense, researchers at the University of Bristol, U.K., reported yesterday (May 30) in PNAS.
“This is a very neat study confirming the recent discovery that bees and some other insects are sensitive to natural electric fields and may use them in their everyday life to forage and communicate,” Mathieu Lihoreau of the Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France, wrote in an email to The Scientist. “Deflection of mechanosensory hairs . . . provides a very simple mechanism and raises the possibility that this phenomenon may be much more common than previously thought, at least in hairy insects.”
Historically, electroreception has most widely been observed in aquatic animals, such as sharks, fish, and dolphins. A few terrestrial animals—including platypuses and echidnas—are also known to have an electric sense, but they require a moist environment to conduct the signals. In 2013, ...
