The relationship between bees and plants is one of the most well-known in the natural world. Almost everyone knows that bees carry pollen from plant to plant and receive a rewarding sip of sugary nectar in return. Surely there are few sides to this most familiar of alliances left to discover?
Not so. Jurgen Tautz and Michael Rostas from the University of Wuerzburg have found that bees provide another service to flowers, besides acting as a pollen vehicle - they deliver a protection service for their very buzzing scares away hungry caterpillars.
In their University's botanical garden, they set up two cubic tents and placed either ten bell peppers or ten soybean plants inside them. On each plant, they added ten caterpillars of the beet armyworm - a voracious plant predator with catholic tastes in food. The only difference between the two tents was that one was connected to a ...
