Amazing: Bumblebees use motor skills to pollinate flowers!

Zee Media Bureau

New Delhi: Yet another discovery in the field of science has revealed how bumblebees use motor skills to pollinate flowers.

As per a recent study conducted by a team of researchers, wild bumblebees are born with the ability to remove pollen from nectarless flowers using high-frequency vibrations.

Bumblebees have been found to grab the flower and then vibrate their muscles to shake loose the pollen. It's known as buzz pollination.

"We studied captive bumblebees from their very first exposure to flowers that need to be vibrated to extract pollen and found the creatures instinctively and almost immediately begin vibrating," said Mario Vallejo-Marin, evolutionary biologist at University of Stirling in Scotland.

The findings showed that initially bees tend to vibrate on the flower petals, but after two or three visits they focus their efforts exclusively on the part of the flower where pollen is produced.

With time and with practice, bees are able to tune down their vibrations, while removing pollen and thus potentially save energy.

(With IANS inputs)