The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

by Zoë Schlanger

The marks looked like tiny crescent moons, always a tell for a bumblebee mouth. But why were bumblebees biting plants? She kept watching. The bumblebees, she realized, were starving. They’d been flying around the closed buds of mustard flowers for days, but no bloom had yet opened. If they didn’t slip their tongues in a pool of sugary flower water soon, they would begin to slow down, their bodies desperately trying to conserve calories. Eventually they would land on the dirt, crawl a while, and die. The poor bees; their timing was all wrong. The flowers weren’t due to open for another month. It wouldn’t do. The bees, she saw, began to bite the plants’ leaves. The next day the flowers bloomed. The bees drank the nectar and survived. Interesting, De Moraes thought. Bees don’t eat leaves. There seemed to be no good reason to waste precious energy on something that wouldn’t feed them. But here they were, biting them regardless. There were moons all over the place. Someone must have noticed this before, she thought. “And then you do this literature search, and it’s like, how did they miss this?” She set up an experiment with all the proper controls and found that bees biting plants made their flowers bloom as much as thirty days earlier than they would otherwise. Obviously, the bees benefit here—but, Consuelo found, so do the plants; they bloom in time to have bees around to pollinate them. Timing in nature is like that: all species rely on other species in one way or another. ...