A new paper in PNAS Nexus, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that chemicals used in agriculture, like fertilizers and pesticides, can change the way bees 'see' a flower, and that this reduces the number of bees visiting a flower.
As with most living creatures, bees carry an innate electric charge. Having found that honeybee hive swarms change the atmospheric electricity by 100 to 1,000 volts per meter, increasing the electric field force normally experienced at ground level, the team developed a model that can predict the influence of other species of insects.