A scientist has set out to prove that flowers can hear everything around them, and she was right, She looked at the flowers of the evening primrose(夜来香) and used sound tests to prove they replied to the sound of bees' wings by increasing the amount of the sugar in their nectar(花蜜).
Thinking that the world is completely filled with sounds. Lilach Hadany, who teaches at the University of Tel Aviv, felt it wouldn't make any sense for flowers to pay no attention to them. In her opinion, any living creature must make use of all its senses to survive until it can reproduce. To prove her guess, Hadany and her team gave the flowers of the evening primrose five sound tests, including three different computer-produced frequencies, silence and the recording of a bee's wing beats.
The study shows that silence had no effect on the flower. However, with the extremely low frequency and the bee's wing beats, the flower spent the following three minutes increasing the sugar content in its nectar by 17%-20%, an obviously clear suggestion that Hadany's guess was right.
Hadany's team found that pollinators(传粉者) were nine times more likely to choose to visit a flower that had been visited by another pollinator within the last six minutes, showing how valuable that small increase in sugar could be for the flower's chances of reproduction.
"We were quite surprised when we found out that it actually worked,"Hadany said. "But after repeating it in other situations, in different seasons, and with flowers grown both indoors and outdoors, we feel very confident in the result."This has helped open up a relatively new field of study-the study of flowers' relations with sound.
