Metallic bonding represents another type of chemical bonding, but the name is a little bit deceiving. It's not really metals bonding together. What it is, it's the attractive force between free floating valence electrons and positively charged ions on a metal surface.
Now metallic bonding is important because it's responsible for the unique physical properties of metals, such as their malleability or their conductivity. If we take a look here at this image of metallic bonding, we have our positive ions on the surface of the metal and moving freely around. Are these negative electrons in green?
Now, these electrons are not confined to each of their metal or positively charged ions. They can actually move to the other ones. They're moving around freely. So metallic bonding is a little bit different from the chemical bonding we're custom to seeing.
