Ed Yong

Bees can sense the electric fields of flowers! That discovery was published last month and it completely blew my mind. Flowers obviously have bright colours and aromatic nectar, but it turns out that they’re also like electric billboards. They have subtle electric fields around them, which bees can sense. The bees can use the fields to tell the difference between differently shaped flowers, and they can distinguish between fresh flowers and those that had just been visited by another bee.

I just love this stuff. Here’s a system—bees and pollinators—that people have studied for centuries, and yet they have this hidden communication channel that we’ve only just discovered? That’s amazing! What else do we not know?

Thanks! I have to say that I loathe the phrase "dumbing down". It's an arrogant way of describing the act of making something accessible. The best science writers never underestimate their audience's intelligence but never overestimate their knowledge either. I try to tell people to remember when their readers last encountered science at school. When they were 15? 18? Then think about how much you knew at that age. Probably not very much. Then write as if you were talking to someone who was as intelligent as you were then but who knew the same amount of bupkis.