(Photo: guy_incognito Via Creative Commons @ Flickr)

Like a neon sign designed to attract customers, flowers emit electrical signals which help draw bees on the hunt for nectar.

While factors such as bright colors, patterns and tempting fragrances play a role in helping bees with their nectar-gathering duties, a study in Science Express reveals electrical signals from the blooms also help bees find and distinguish their targeted flowers.

Researchers from Bristol University’s School of Biological Sciences found that patterns of electrical signals emitted by flowers communicate information to the little pollinators.

Plants commonly emit weak and negatively-charged electric fields.  As they fly through the air, bees pick up positive electrical charges. Usually when a negative electrical signal meets a positive one, sparks can fly, but in the case of the bee and the bloom, nothing is exchanged except helpful information.

(Photo: BitHead Via Creative Commons @ Flickr)

“The co-evolution between flowers and bees has a long and beneficial history,” said Daniel Robert, the study’s lead author. “So perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that we are still discovering today how remarkably sophisticated their communication is.”

Another study on bees, from the University of Cambridge, suggests the contrast between flowers and their background is more important to bees than the colored vein patterns on pale flowers.

While flowers with patterns of varied color are more attractive to bees and provide them with guidance as to where to find nectar, researchers found little evidence to suggest bees specifically prefer the striped flowers.

The study revealed that solid red flowers reflect very little light and aren’t as interesting for the bees.

A bee grabs some nectar from a daisy (Photo: quas Via Creative Commons @ Flickr)

When compared with red blooms, researchers found flowers with an ivory background seemed to have the greatest effect on the bees. They think that’s because the ivory color contrasted better with the background than the red flowers.

The study also points out that bees were able to tell the difference between solid ivory and veined flowers, but had no preference between the two.  But, the researchers did find that both the solid ivory and veined flowers were much more popular with bees than the solid red flowers.

“Venation patterns (the distribution or arrangement of a system of veins on a flower) might be prevalent in nature because they can be useful nectar guides, particularly when they also increase flower visibility. But it appears that the color contrast of a flower with its background has a greater influence on bee preference,” the research team concluded in a released statement.

Like humans, insects communicate with each other by “telephone” and can even leave messages, according to Dutch researchers.

No special electronics are needed because the bugs literally use green technology – plants – to communicate.

According to the new study from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology and Wageningen University, insects which live in and above the ground use a plant as a telephone by eating its roots. That changes the chemical composition of its leaves, which in turn causes the plant to release alarm signals into the air.

These signals tell other insects not to eat that plant and move along, in order to avoid any competition between insects. The signals also warn others of possibly-dangerous chemical compounds in the plant.

If a bug isn’t around to immediately receive the message, the study shows another insect can leave a ‘voicemail’ message in the soil itself, through various soil fungi, by leaving specific remains in the soil after eating from the plant.

In the Netherlands Institute of Ecology greenhouse, plants and plant-feeding insects are put together to assess their ability to store 'voicemail messages' in the soil. (Photo: Olga Kostenko/NIOO-KNAW)

Unlike our own ‘voicemail’ messages which disappear at a push of a button, these warning messages live on to serve future generations of insects.  Any new plants that happen to grow on the same spot, according to the research, can grab these same signals from the soil and again communicate the message to other insects.

The messages left in the soil can be rather specific . The new plant could warn bugs that its predecessor suffered from conditions that could be harmful to insects.

In their experiments, the researchers grew ragwort plants in a greenhouse and then left the plants open to threatening insects, such as leaf-eating caterpillars or root-feeding beetle larvae.  They later replaced those plants by growing new ones in the same soil and again the plants were left open to the hungry insects.

“What we discovered is that the composition of fungi in the soil changed greatly and depended on whether the insect had been feeding on roots or leaves,” explains researcher and study author, Olga Kostenko. “These changes in fungal community, in turn, affected the growth and chemistry of the next batch of plants and therefore the insects on those plants.”

The researchers are working to find an answer to how long the warning messages remain in the soil and just how widespread this occurrence is throughout nature.