Caffeinated drinks are famous for their ‘buzz’, but when it comes to bees, the effect is quite literal.
When bees were given caffeine-laced nectar, they appeared more motivated and efficient when it came to finding flowers to pollinate.
Insect experts from the University of Greenwich found that added caffeine helped the bees remember the smell of specific flowers that contained nectar, and were more likely to pollinate those flowers, too.
As fears grow of a bee population collapse, which would be disastrous for crops across the UK, researchers hope that caffeine might encourage bees to pollinate certain plants and increase yield.
Bumblebees are an essential pollinator for a vast array of crops, including most vegetables and legumes.
The study, published in Current Biology, is the first to show that bees can have their flower finding abilities boosted by consuming caffeine at home, in their nests.
‘When you give bees caffeine, they don’t do anything like fly in loops, but do seem to be more motivated and more efficient,’ said study author Dr Sarah Arnold.
‘We wanted to see if providing caffeine would help their brains create a positive association between a certain flower odour and a sugar reward.’
The experiment found 86 normal bumblebees and divided them into three groups: one group were given caffeine nectar while exposed to a strawberry scent; the second were given the scent while having nectar with no caffeine; and a third were given no caffeine and no flower scent.
When the bees were allowed to roam in an area with two ‘artificial’ flowers, one with a strawberry scent and another with an unfamiliar odour, the caffeinated bees appeared better able to remember.
Unlike the 60 percent of bees that had been given the plain nectar, 70.4 percent of the caffeinated bees visited the strawberry flowers first.
The difference, too large to just be random, suggests the caffeine helped the bees form an association between the flower and the scent, which could help its ability in the wild to identify the correct plants to pollinate.
However, scientists found that the effect was short-lived – as the caffeine wore off, the preference for strawberry flowers appeared to diminish.
‘This is something we could have anticipated, because the bees got sugar no matter if they visited the target flower or the distractor flower,’ said Dr Arnold.
‘In some ways, they were unlearning just as fast as they were learning.’
Another improvement that researchers noticed was in the bees’ ‘handling speed’, or how many flowers they could visit in a set period.
If the results hold true for the real world, without any adverse consequences, it could be a boon for farmers looking to increase their crop yields.
Source: Read Full Article