Moisture from flowers attracts bees

Flowers have several invisible ways to attract pollinators. One of them is humidity, capable of signaling the presence of nectar to bees. Until a joint study was carried out at the universities of Bristol and Exeter, in England, it was believed that it was only the bright colors of the flowers that attracted bees.

The new research, now published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, showed that bees are able to accurately detect and choose among flowers that have different types of moisture close to the surface. Scientists discovered that bees could be trained to differentiate between two types of artificial flowers with different moisture levels if only one provided a sugar water reward.

The researcher Michael Harrap, from the University of Bristol, is the study's lead author. He said: "We know that different species of plants produce flowers with distinct patterns of unity, which differ from the surrounding air. Knowing that bees can use these patterns to help them find food shows that flowers have evolved in a huge variety of ways. different from attracting pollinators".

At the University of Exeter, professor Natalie Hempel de Ibarra explained: "Our study shows that bees not only use this sensory information to make choices about how they behave, but are also able to learn to distinguish between moisture patterns in a similar way to how they learn to recognize color or the smell of flower".

The teacher Sean Rands, also from Bristol, adds that "if humidity patterns are important in attracting pollinators, they are likely to be one of several different signals (such as color, scent and shape pattern) that a flower is using at the same time, and can help the bee identify and handle the flower more efficiently. The effectiveness of humidity patterns may depend on the humidity of the surrounding environment; climate change may affect this environmental unit, which in turn would have a negative effect on a visiting bee, because the effectiveness of the humidity pattern would be altered.”

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