Bumblebees’ ‘clever trick’ fools plants into flowering | Hacker News Reader

Bumblebees’ ‘clever trick’ fools plants into flowering

bbc.com

99 pointsboulos26 comments

One need not view this as "damaging" the plants. It is also a crude signalling mechanism. The plants need the bees in order to survive as a species. If they're able to feed the bees in times of famine, both the bees and the plants win.

Furthermore, a plant species that can help to feed bees during a pollinator-famine is a plant species that is going to get a lot of pollinator support.

I've heard that from an insect's perspective, witch hazel tastes terrible and/or isn't that nutritious.

But it gets away with it because it's the only game in town. Nothing else is blooming at that time, and if you haven't gone dormant (or woke up too early) it's witch hazel pollen or nothing at all.

Bees never cease to fascinate me. The more I learn about them the more I realize we only understand a small part of their world. We still have tremendous things to learn about their society, how they cooperate, communicate.

Check this out about Japanese honeybees that I learned last month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awoV5Wj9Iys They will swarm invaders and buzz their wings creating enough friction and heat to kill the enemy. European honeybees, however, do not have the same instinct.

Bees are amazing and woefully underappreciated. I had a garden going year before last, and some bees would come and just take care of the pollination for me. Last year though, no bee bros.

Pollinating by hand sucks. Royally. Still considering maybe trying to raise a hive.

I wonder if we'll ever see indoor farms which grow fruits from stem cells, without the need for the rest of the plant.

I asked this some time ago and never found a satisfactory answer. There doesn't appear to be much research in this area either :/

I looked into it briefly a few months ago but I'm not a biochemist/plant scientist; there is a lot of research on growing human organs, not so much growing fruits.

I'm sure it's possible to trick a plant stem cell into turning into a flower, then fruit, but I think the main question is whether it's economically viable. At the end of the day you would have to bypass photosynthesis and introduce sugars from some external source to grow the fruit which is probably quite expensive and inefficient. I chalked it up to being a very obvious idea which Monsato would have a solution for if it was viable.

Interesting to think though that if you did it perfectly you could turn some weight in sugar + water + stuff into an avocado.

I worry that it's not as easy as just tricking some cells into growing into what they want - you'll likely also need to replicate appropriate flow of energy, nutrients and signalling chemicals - i.e. basically fake the rest of the plant.

The title sounds like they are click baiting the flowers. Then I realized that was actually the case.

"You'll never believe the way these bees got this plant to flower! Unbelievable"

"Dandelions hate them"

New salad diet helps bumblebees slim down. Can it help you?

I was recently cutting a path through an area that's been left go wild for 15 years. I've gone at it from both ends but there s patch in the middle that I'm leaving for now. It's an area filled with some kind of flowering weed that looks a bit like white bluebells only with much greater density of flowers. It's alive with bees and and I neither want to be stung nor want to deprive them of food. I figure a narrow path through it leaving the weeds at both sides once they've stopped collecting pollen this year.

Could they be cutting holes in the leaves and inserting some sort of pollen solution (gathered from other plants) and when the non-flowering plant gets the chemical marker for "other plants are pollenating" then it tricks the plant into believing it it is time to flower?

I ask with no knowledge of this :) But I do remember flipping through a book a while back on chemical and environmental tricks to make plants flower in greenhouses (not just lighting signals)

It's possible that plants detect the chemical markers of the insects while they bite the leaves. A response to pests could be early flowering, to give the plant a better chance to complete its life cycle.

Chitosan is derived from chitin, and it acts in a similar way, it induces an immune response in plants, and makes them more vigorous. Plants treated with chitosan usually grow larger, flower earlier, and produce more fruit.

I’m not sure it’s damage or fooling the plants. The whole purpose of flowers is to be pollinated by bees.

>"I think it's fascinating how much we still don't know about organisms that we think we know really well," said Prof De Moraes.

I'm always taken aback by these types of statements. The best scientists know that they know very little.

Knowing that you don't much is not the same as discovering new things you didn't know. If the"awe and wonder" weren't there, they probably wouldn't have chosen that field.

And it IS fascinating to uncover unknown unknowns

Fascinating, not surprising.

I once saw this happening. Lots of bumblebees on tree leaves and flying around certain trees. I thought that they were eating something from the leaves. It seemed weird but I assumed it was a known behavior.

The trick doesn't work if reproduced by humans - obviously it is misunderstood

This seems to be a symbioticaly developed messaging system. The bees need the plants and the plants need the bees: so the been message them in case they are having a hard time. Since if the bees die because of not enough pollen -> plants die also.

Bees probably release some special chemical through their saliva or whatever they have to message the plants that they are not some random animal eating it.

From TFA:

> However the team are keeping an open mind on whether the plants might be the ones in the driving seat.

If that’s the case, maybe the headline should read “bumbling bees tricked into working early by clever plants”

All joking aside, this seems like a textbook case of correlation having been established, but causation not so much (yet).

It's probably both ways. Neither evolved in isolation and flowers and bees have been doing it since ever.

Well, at least since the Cretaceous :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_history_of_plants... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee#Evolution

TIL most dinosaurs never saw a flower :(

To be fair, you've never seen a forest of mushrooms. That might have been neat too.

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