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Welcome to It's Okay To Be Smart, I'm DOCTOR Joe Hanson [cheering and music].
For bees and flower blossoms, springtime is all about two things: feeding and fertilizing.
See the flowers want to pass their genes on to the next generation, and the bees need
to eat so they can do the same.
So they use a little teamwork.
But how do bees find flowers?
And how do flowers find bees?
What does a bee see when they see one of these?
For millions of years plants have evolved to depend on insects and other pollinators
to carry their genes on to the next generation.
A flower is like a big neon sign they use to say "land here!"
In return for getting a helping hand in making baby plants, most flowers offer up a tasty
treat in the form of nectar.
It's like a dinner date, only you eat afterwards.
Biologists call this kind of arrangement "mutualism".
The flower gets to spread its genes, and the worker bee gets a sugary drink and packs her
knees with golden protein-rich pollen to take back to the thousands of hungry mouths back
at the hive.
Everybody gets what they want.
Flowers sure look pretty to us, but bees see them in a completely different light.
Literally.
Not only do they see the world through these compound eyes made of thousands of individual
pixels, they see a world bathed in ultraviolet.
Way beyond what our eyes can see.
We see this.
And they see THIS.
See, special pigments absorb the UV light and they paint this big bullseye in the center
of the flower, guiding the bee to the tasty nectar and of course, that sweet, sweet pollination.
Now the relationship between flowers and bees goes way beyond the visual.
Scientists from the University of Bristol recently discovered that bees can sense a
flower's electric field.
Just like when you run across a carpet in your socks, bees build up a positive charge
as they buzz through the air.
And flowers are slightly negative.
This helps pollen jump from the flower to the bee like electric velcro.
It also helps the bee figure out if another worker has already visited that flower and
slurped up all the goodness.
Now, nobody knows quite how the bees sense that electric charge, but their fuzzy little
bodies might be buzzing like your hair when you rub a balloon across it.
Now, evolution's been playing matchmaker between bees and flowers for millions of years, resulting
in one of nature's closest relationships.
So next time you see a bee buzzing around the garden on a warm spring afternoon, imagine
how their world looks, and think about how much of nature is invisible unless you see
it through the right pair of eyes.
Thanks for watching!
Leave us a comment and let us know if YOU have a question.
Make sure to subscribe, and as always, stay curious . . . and stop to smell the flowers.