Bumblebees may bite leaves to spur plant blooming
HANNIER PULIDO, C. DE MORAES, MESCHER LABORATORIES
Here’s a tip for bumblebees to get a slowpoke plant to bloom early. Just bite its leaves.
At least three species of bumblebees use their mouths to snip little confetti bits out of plant foliage. This foliage biting gets more common when there’s a pollen shortage, says Consuelo De Moraes. She’s a chemical ecologist and entomologist who works at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Her team reported its findings in the May 22 Science.
De Moraes and her colleagues set up experiments with mustard and tomato plants. Plants nibbled by Bombus terrestris bees bloomed days or weeks earlier than unbitten plants. For these bumblebees, accelerating bloom times could be a lifesaver. When trying to start colonies in early spring, the bees rely on flower pollen as a protein source to feed their young.
Foteini Paschalidou is an ecologist now at France’s National Institute for Agricultural Research in Versailles-Grignon. She was the first team member to call attention to the behavior. She was working indoors on a different project with caged B. terrestris bees. At first, De Moraes worried. “Is it something wrong with them?”
The bees’ supplier and some farmers who used them to pollinate crops assured the researchers that nipping happens elsewhere. The team, though, hasn’t found any accounts in the scientific literature.
Biting bumblebees
To test a link between leaf biting and pollen shortages, the researchers did a caged-bee test. First, they deprived the insects of pollen for three days. Then the researchers trapped the bumblebees with nonblooming plants. These bees were more likely to poke holes in foliage than a bee group buzzing among plants with plentiful flowers. When researchers swapped the bees’ situations, the insects now trapped without blooms started nibbling leaves.
The team also did tests on the roof of the lab building. There the bees were free to seek flowers in rooftop planters and elsewhere. These tests, too, linked pollen shortage and increased leaf biting.
Bee on leaf, leaf with holes
During a pollen shortage, a bumblebee cruising a leaf (left) becomes more likely to make quick punctures and cuts that leave small holes (right).
F. PASHALIDOU ET AL/SCIENCE 2020
The notion that bee damage to a leaf could jump-start flowering originally struck Mark Mescher as a long shot. Mescher is a coauthor, also at ETH Zurich. Yet in lab tests, tomato plants punctured five to 10 times by pollen-deprived bees bloomed 30 days earlier on average than did undamaged plants. But the speed-up time varied by plant species. For instance, bee-nipped black mustard (Brassica nigra) bloomed only about 16 days early.
This acceleration in bee-pestered plants is not entirely a surprise. Other types of stress also have triggered early blooming, he points out. Those stressors include drought, skimpy nutrients and assault by leaf-eating insect pests. But how bee bites might tap into the internal clock that triggers a plant to switch from leafing to flowering remains a big question.
Scientists waiting with forceps and a razor on a lab rooftop tried to mimic bee activity in real time, bite by bite, on comparison plants. But the scientists got only a modest acceleration in the black mustard, and no real change in the tomatoes. So there might be something special in a bee bite.
In a happy accident, the outdoor trials attracted visits from two other Bombus species. Those bees checked out the plants on offer and also nicked holes in leaves. That confirms that leaf nibbling is not just some quirk of a commercial line of bees. However, two long-time bumblebee watchers — Dave Goulson at the University of Sussex in England and Lynn Adler at the University of Massachusetts Amherst — say they’ve never noticed it.
Goulson says he’s fascinated by the idea. B. terrestris commonly cuts holes in plant parts, but in a slightly different context. Sometimes these and other bumblebees don’t grope for nectar through the natural openings of flowers. Instead, they just bite little holes through the outer wall of a flower for a sip. “I can imagine that hungry bees unable to find flowers might try biting leaves in desperation,” he says. Flower biting might thus have evolved into leaf biting. However, as Mescher points out, it could have happened the opposite way, too.
With those intriguing ideas buzzing around, clearly now is a great time to go watch bees.
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Power Words
More About Power Words
acceleration: A change in the speed or direction of some object.
average: (in science) A term for the arithmetic mean, which is the sum of a group of numbers that is then divided by the size of the group.
behavior: The way something, often a person or other organism, acts towards others, or conducts itself.
chemical: A substance formed from two or more atoms that unite (bond) in a fixed proportion and structure. For example, water is a chemical made when two hydrogen atoms bond to one oxygen atom. Its chemical formula is H2O. Chemical also can be an adjective to describe properties of materials that are the result of various reactions between different compounds.
coauthor: One of a group (two or more people) who together had prepared a written work, such as a book, report or research paper. Not all coauthors may have contributed equally.
colleague: Someone who works with another; a co-worker or team member.
context: The setting or circumstances that help explain an event, some statement or some conclusion.
drought: An extended period of abnormally low rainfall; a shortage of water resulting from this.
ecologist: A scientist who works in a branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings.
entomologist: A biologist who specializes in the study of insects. A paleoentomologist studies ancient insects, mainly through their fossils.
insect: A type of arthropod that as an adult will have six segmented legs and three body parts: a head, thorax and abdomen. There are hundreds of thousands of insects, which include bees, beetles, flies and moths.
link: A connection between two people or things.
literature: The books, studies and other writings published on a particular subject. Scientific literature usually refers to published papers or meeting abstracts describing new research findings or the reviews of multiple papers on a topic within some field.
nectar: A sugary fluid secreted by plants, especially by flowers. It encourages pollination by insects and other animals. It is collected by bees to make into honey.
nutrient: A vitamin, mineral, fat, carbohydrate or protein that a plant, animal or other organism requires as part of its food in order to survive.
pollen: Powdery grains released by the male parts of flowers that can fertilize the female tissue to make a seed. Pollinating insects, such as bees, often pick up pollen that will later be eaten.
pollinate: To transport male reproductive cells — pollen — to female parts of a flower. This allows fertilization, the first step in plant reproduction.
protein: A compound made from one or more long chains of amino acids. Proteins are an essential part of all living organisms. They form the basis of living cells, muscle and tissues; they also do the work inside of cells.
real time: A term that connotes immediacy; something is being studied, recorded and/or reported at the very time it is happening.
species: A group of similar organisms capable of producing offspring that can survive and reproduce.
stress: (in biology) A factor — such as unusual temperatures, movements, moisture or pollution — that affects the health of a species or ecosystem. (in psychology) A mental, physical, emotional or behavioral reaction to an event or circumstance (stressor) that disturbs a person or animal’s usual state of being or places increased demands on a person or animal; psychological stress can be either positive or negative.
stressor: Something that induces stress in an individual or system.
