This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Life is not always easy for a bee: Not all plants place their pollen outside. Some flowers have to be set to vibrating before the pollen can get out of their tube-like stamens.
Certain bee species have developed a special technique for this: They bite on the flower and use their flight muscles to generate rapid vibrations. The stamen is shaken and the pollen is released. This phenomenon is known as "buzz pollination." Mechanically, however, what happens is surprisingly complex.
Buzz pollination is much more complicated than, say, shaking a salt shaker to release grains of salt. Until now, the role played by the mechanical properties of the flower in this process was not understood. In a collaborative FWF project with botanists from Uni Wien, a team at TU Wien has investigated how complex-shaped stamens respond to the vibrations generated by bees.
What matters is not only how fast and how strongly a flower vibrates, but also how its individual parts move relative to one another. The work is published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Depending on the vibration frequency used to excite an object, it can be set into very different kinds of motion.
A familiar example is a washing machine: At a certain rotational speed, it may become very noisy or even start moving across the floor, while at a slightly higher or lower speed, the effect suddenly disappears. "This can happen, for example, because different parts of an object move together at certain frequencies, but move in opposite directions at others," says Siyang Zhou from the Institute of Mechatronics and Power Electronics (MPEI) at TU Wien. "Exactly this also happens in the stamens of the tropical plant Medinilla magnifica.
When we excite them at different frequencies, they respond in very different ways." Previous biomechanical studies of buzz pollination have often focused on plants of the genus Solanum, which includes the tomato. Their stamens are comparatively straight and stiff and behave mechanically approximately like a rigid body moving up and down. In Medinilla magnifica, which was investigated in the new study, the situation is considerably more complex.
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