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Buzz Pollination
Megachile parietina pollinating Trichodesma boissieri
The flower blooms “upside down”, like the Cyclamen’s flower: the petals are rolled up backwards, while the style and stamens are seen below. The pollen is capsuled inside the stamens, it does not disperse and is not available to every insect that comes to the flower. The bee that approaches the flower holds on to it with its mouth and rapidly vibrates its wings with a strong buzzing sound. This buzz creates resonance that shakes the stamen and make the pollen pour down (just like salt from the holes in a salt-shaker). Some of the pollen drops on the bee. When this bee will visit a new flower, it will touch its stigma, and thus pollinate it.
https://www.botanic.co.il/en/knowledge/trichodesma-boissieri/
''Megachile parietina'' is a species of bee in the family Megachilidae. It was described by Geoffroy in 1785. It is native to most of central Europe, as well as parts of eastern Europe.
comments (5)
tomatoes, eggplants and potatoes are pollinated the same way - they also have upside-down plants with pollen locked in the stamens. Posted 5 years ago
This photo is a lot more complicated than it may seem! Certain bees, such as bumblebees, carpenter bees, and other wild bees, do something that honeybees can’t do: they buzz pollinate.
Buzz pollination, also called sonication, is complicated and completely awesome. During buzz pollination, bees unhook their flight muscles from their wings so that they can contract them without taking flight. Then, they vibrate their bodies by rapidly contracting their indirect flight muscles. They produce strong vibrations that forcibly expel pollen from the flower’s anthers. The vibrating bees can generate forces of up to 30 G!
Very cool, indeed! But, it gets better.
The buzz pollinated flowers are specialists. They have poricidal anthers, which means the pollen is not freely accessible. The anthers will only release pollen for bees that stimulate them in the right way. A bee needs to possess the proper “buzz-thusiasm”! Bees must vibrate at the correct frequency (in the tone of middle C) and in just the right spot for the pollen to burst out of the miniscule holes on the anthers. Each burst only releases about 20% of the flower’s total pollen, which encourages bees to make multiple visits to flowers. Pollen gets stuck on the bee’s fuzzy body, is transferred to other flowers, and thus cross-pollinates them.
What happens if a bee tries to buzz pollinate a flower that has already been pollinated? That doesn’t happen because bees have a positive electrostatic charge and flowers have a negative charge. So, before a bee lands on a flower, it uses its body hairs to detect the flower’s charge…like static electricity. Flowers that have been visited by other bees will have lost some of their negative charge. A visiting bee will sense this and move on to another flower so it doesn’t waste any time or energy.
There are about 20,000 species of flowering plants that rely on buzz pollination! These include potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins, blueberries, zucchinis, eggplants, and cranberries! So, you could definitely say that it is critical to human agriculture! {Xylocopa (pollinating Trichodesma boissieri) spotted in Israel by JungleDragon moderator, Yael Orgad} #JungleDragon #Buzzpollination
https://www.facebook.com/jungledragonwildlife/ Posted 5 years ago