Bumblebees use a lot of tools to find nectar in flowers like visual cues and chemical signs. But, as it turns out, they’re also able to detect weak electrical signals that flowers give off. Researchers their discovery after putting bees through an experiment. They built 10 flowers with the same shape, size and smell. They put sugar water on some of the flowers and then added small static electric fields to those flowers. On the rest of the flowers, they put bitter water and no electric field. They let the bees loose among the flowers and kept moving the flowers around so the bees couldn’t learn the location of the sugar water. As they forage, they start to go to the flowers with the sugar water 80 percent of the time, figuring out the difference between the two sets of flowers. After turning off the voltage, bees were unable to tell the difference, proving that it was the voltage itself that they were using to tell the difference between the flowers. http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-06-26/flowers-give-electrical-signals-bees
