Save the bees! 

Save the bees because they make the honey you eat!

But more pressingly – save the bees because the bees sustain our ecosystem (Weldermariam, 2019)!

Bees play an essential role as pollinators for a healthy ecosystem which provides most of our food production. An interruption of this process brings about a massive decrease in food productivity and an accompanying breakdown of our food chain (Weldermariam, 2019).

Apis mellifera, the honey bee, is becoming increasingly vulnerable in the Anthropocene. Causes of bee death are a result of many anthropogenic threats such as habitat destruction and use of pesticides (Weldermariam, 2019).

How does such a teeny tiny (kind of adorable looking) insect do so much for us?


One morning a few weekends ago I noticed tens of honey bees buzzing around the flowering dragonfruit plant in my backyard. We rarely get bee visits as the area surrounding here is mostly the foliage of tall gum trees amongst concrete. I wondered how the bees found my dragonfruit plant, for they arrived literally the day the first flowers bloomed!

A few days later I was showing a friend the photos I took that morning of the bees, and my friend shared a story of their friends who also have a dragonfruit plant who also have commented on the sudden arrival of buzzing honey bees seemingly out of thin air!

In 2019 The New York Times published an article entitled How Bees Find Your Flowerpots. In their article Ray writes that honey bees “can detect and discriminate among weak electrostatic fields emanating from flowers” (2019).

“The bees accumulate a positive charge, while the flowers have a negative charge. The interaction between the fields is detected by antennae or sensitive hairs on the body. The electrical field helps bees to recognize pollen-rich blooms and perhaps even to transfer the pollen” (Ray, 2019).

This phenomena is called ‘electroreception’ – the ability of an organism to detect external electric forces.

Electroreception has been observed and studied in aquatic animals like fish, amphibians, and platypus (Clarke et al., 2017). It has long been hypothesised in bees and only recent studies of honey bees and bombs terrestris (bumble bees) have provided evidence for this phenomenon.

Bumble bees can sense the presence of electric fields (e-fields) surrounding flowers with Mechanosensory hairs on their body. These hairs are mechanically deflected by an applied electric stimulus, eliciting neural responses that convert information to the bumble bee’s central nervous system (Clarke et al., 2017).

Honey bees use their electroreception for intraspecies communication, they utilise their antennae for e-field detection. Honey bees returning from foraging do a “waggle dance”, low frequency oscillating electrical stimuli are produced by the electrically charged vibrating foragers as they waggle (Clarke et al., 2017).

The triboelectric effect is the phenomenon of materials that take on or give up electrons upon frictional contact with a different material, thus coming negatively or positively charged (Clarke et al., 2017). Think of when you rub a balloon onto your t-shirt and it sticks onto the hair on your head. Bees becoming positively charged due to the triboelectric effect as the high-energy motion of their flight is met with friction from the air and between various surfaces on the bee itself (Clarke et al., 2017).

“The tripartite interactions between bees, flowers, and the electric field that exist all around them, reveal thus far under appreciated physical and sensory ecologies” (Clarke et al., 2017).

Long before iPhones and Google Maps bees have been using the earth's electricity as their own personal GPS.

The bees go about their lives as they have done since the first bee pollinated the first flower, it is in the Anthropocene that these tiny fuzzy insects risk becoming extinct. Humans must remember that if the bees go, we follow closely behind. 

- Steph Philipov, z3417828

References

Clarke, D., Morley, E., & Robert, D. (2017). The bee, the flower, and the electric field: electric ecology and aerial electroreception. Journal of Comparative Physiology A, 203(9), 737-748. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-017-1176-6

Ray, C. C. (2019, April 1). How Bees Find Your Flowerpots. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/science/bees-flowers-pollen-honey.html

Weldemariam, K. (2020). ‘Becoming-with bees’: generating affect and response-abilities with the dying bees in early childhood education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 41(3), 391-406.