Bumblebees are known to be effective at a manoeuvre called buzz pollination, where the bees produce a distinctive buzzing sound, by rapid contacting muscles in the thorax when collecting pollen from the anthers of a flower. This is especially important in flowers that keep their pollen in tubular anthers with only a small hole at the end for the release of pollen. The pollen is released in response to the vibrations produced when the bee buzzes, but it is not just the sound that vibrates the anthers.
Bumblebees hold onto the filaments that support the anthers and transmit vibrations to the anthers from their legs and body. The more vibrations of the anthers the more pollen is released. Some bumblebees also grab hold of the anther filaments with their mandibles whilst buzzing but this was thought to be a means of helping the bee to hold onto the flower. A group of scientists have taken high speed video recording of buzzing bumblebees to see if “anther biting” with mandibles while buzzing enhanced the vibration of the anthers.
They found the bees were vibrating their heads as well as their thoracic regions and transmitting the vibrations to the anthers via the mandibles. According to Science News “the head shakes are mind-numbingly fast, accelerating several hundred times faster than the acceleration of gravity” and further research is needed to find out how they achieve this.
Overall, the bees’ head banging movements enhanced the vibration of the anthers by up to three times in some flowers and resulted in more pollen being released. Charlie Woodrow, an evolutionary biologist at Uppsala University, who led the study commented: “The study really highlights just how little we know about this mode of pollination.”
References: Science (AAAS) News 29 August 2024; Current Biology 16 August 2024 doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.07.044
Editorial Comment: There is more to learn about plant pollination but it won’t be explained by evolution. Evolutionary biologists may be able to study how bees and flowers work together to for successful pollination but they will not be able to explain how the bees developed the muscles and nervous system control needed to produce vibrations at the right intensity and frequency to shake pollen out of tubular anthers.
Nor can they explain how plants developed flowers that have their pollen in in tubular anthers that need vibrations to extract instead of having it freely available as most flowers do.
Most of all they cannot explain how both the bees and flowers evolved within the same generation, because if they didn’t the plants would die out.
If you believe Genesis it is no problem. God created fully formed plants and fully formed functional pollinators within two days of one another.
Creation Research News 5 September 2024
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