Science is Fun Fridays!
The finding is just over a year old, but I only recently saw the article, so hopefully this is new to you too!
A recent study suggests that plants, such as the evening primrose, can hear buzzing bees and they sweeten up their nectar in response.
Ears, as we understand them, are not necessary to detect the presence of sound waves. Scientists found that the petals "hear" for the plant, and are tuned to the low frequency of a bee's hum. This makes sense when we consider the shape of many flower's petals - conical or cupped, like the dahlia.
The team exposed the flowers to five settings: silence, the buzz of a bee from 4 inches away, as well as low, intermediate, and high pitched sounds produced by a computer.
Blossoms exposed to silence and intermediate to high frequencies waves produced baseline sugar. The blossoms exposed to the bee's buzz and low frequencies increased their sugar content 12-20 percent within 3 minutes.
To confirm their results, they placed the flowers in a laser vibrometer, which records very small movements, and found that the petals only resonated with the bee sounds and the low frequency sounds. If petals were removed, the sense of hearing was disabled.
Lilach Hadany, the lead of the study, calls this "phytoacoustics."
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