What is more interesting to me, is the fact that flowers are beautiful and bees and people seem to universally recognize this. There is a sophisticated information exchange going with respect to how flowers evolved to attract pollinators. Co-evolution with information exchange across species. See David Deutsch's 'The Beginning of Infinity' for a fascinating discussion on objective beauty...
Ah, time for one of my favourite ever articles: QUANTUM BEES! <a href="http://discovermagazine.com/1997/nov/quantumhoneybees1263" rel="nofollow">http://discovermagazine.com/1997/nov/quantumhoneybees1263</a>
Wonder how they managed to measure such weak signals from the flowers. Also not sure if signal is the right term to use, because from the article it seems that no information (in conventional sense)is being transferred. Charged particle q (bumblebee) feels some force (F=q*E1 since we can neglect magnetic field) that is the consequence of static field E1 from flower :) Although it could also be the other way round, i.e. the bumblebee could produce field E2 etc.
> <i>Plants are usually charged negatively and emit weak electric fields. On their side, bees acquire a positive charge as they fly through the air. ...</i><p>> <i>How then do bees detect electric fields?</i><p>Why is the answer not as simple as: The bees feel an attractive force when they are near the flower?
I think there's a ton of this kind of communication going on that we don't realize. I have been a practitioner of QiGong for about 9 months and it has opened me up to a whole different dimension of information that is passed between living things. I think much more study is needed on these methods of energy transferrence between living organisms.<p>These kinds of subtle communications make up a dimension of the human experience that can only be consciously experience by being actively cultivated and the main stream scientific community has bound itself to a set of ideological assumptions (IMHO inhereted from the Christian church) that deny the existence of these dimensions of human experience and so do not respect their cultivation or deem them worthy of study.<p>This is going to become more of an issue the closer our technological interfaces interact with our senses. These assumptions about what we are, how we communicate, and how we interact with the physical/spiritual world form the base assumptions underlying the future course of our evolution and progress. What happens if by augmenting/modifying one sense we cut ourselves off from another that informs us subconsciously?